From Artspace’s online group exhibition “Winter”:
Ekberg’s photograph turns on contrasts: liquid and solid, cold and heat, darkness and luminescence. At the same time, there’s a chime in the brief life of the sparkler’s flame and the fact that the lake will one day melt under the warmth of a spring sun. While this is a staged image (how could it not be?), its artifice nevertheless gives rise to both wonder and a strange disquiet. We’re reminded, perhaps, of the poet Robert Frost’s famous verse, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1922), in which a pause by a “frozen lake” on “the darkest evening of the year” causes a traveler to reflect on his own mortality and entertain sudden, seductive thoughts of self-oblivion, which he finally dismisses with the words: “But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep”.
Browse the series “Images (2005-2010)” at ClampArt
Browse all of Adam Ekberg’s work at ClampArt