Event
Thin Ice
Joseph Smolinski
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by Joseph Smolinski.
Thin Ice, 2020
Digital animation, 6 min. 31 sec.
I was born in the 1970’s shortly after the Oil Embargo that brought our country to a halt. The period of 1975-1980 was a missed opportunity to learn from our unsustainable addiction to fossil fuels and embrace innovative new green technologies. In hindsight, this inaction has set us on a course of grave danger all while marketing campaigns from corporate entities steered popular culture away from the environmental movement of the time. I distinctly remember watching 80’s automotive commercials from Ford, Dodge and Chevrolet of rugged trucks ripping through the landscape and performing off-road feets in slow motion. Phrases like “Built Ford Tough” and “Like a Rock” were designed to perpetuate toxic masculinity with little regard to sustainability. These tropes come from a long line of colonial views of the environment in which a landscape must be tamed and conquered. Thin Ice is an animation project that draws from formulaic American truck commercials and my memories of growing up in Minnesota. Each Spring the nightly news would air reports of the latest automobile stranded and sinking through the thinning ice of area lakes. Fueled by automotive fetishism and masculine folly this moving image is a striking metaphor of the state of the environment.
-Joseph Smolinksi
About the Artist
Joseph Smolinski is a multidisciplinary artist and educator that lives and works in New Haven, CT. His practice questions the shifting roles of technology within communication networks, energy and oil companies, and the industrial agricultural infrastructure, which indelibly shape the so-called natural environment. Smolinski received his BFA from the University of Wisconsin (1999) and his MFA from the University of Connecticut, Storrs (2001). Group exhibition venues include Diverse Works, Houston, TX; MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown, OH; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. Solo exhibitions include Mixed Greens Gallery, NY; Swarm Gallery, Oakland, CA; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; and ArtSpace, New Haven, CT. His work has been discussed in Art in America, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and Art Papers. He is a recipient of the Connecticut Commission of the Arts 2012 Artist Fellowship, the 2014 Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the College of the Environment at Wesleyan University, and a 2012 Artist Resource Trust Grant from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation. He has been an artist in residence at Wassaic Projects, 2021 and the Happy and Bob Doran Connecticut AIR Program at Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace, New Haven.
