Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow: The music of nature shared in silence

In exploring the shared language and poetic sensibilities of all animals, I am working towards rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people saw themselves as part of nature and not outside of it. The destiny of whales cannot be separated from the destiny of man, and the destiny of man cannot be separated from the destiny of all of nature. I am exploring new narratives that help build a bridge across the artificial boundaries we have established between ourselves and other species.

- Gregory Colbert

“Feather to fire,fire to blood

Blood to bone,bone to marrow

Marrow to ashes,ashes to snow”
― Gregory Colbert

Gregory Colbert's Ashes and Snow is an ongoing project comprised of photographic artworks, a one-hour film and two short film “haikus,” and a novel in letters all presented in a purpose-built temporary structure called the Nomadic Museum.

Colbert’s images, visceral yet dreamlike, return us to a place we long for but cannot name. His photographs and films reawaken an ancient memory in us of a time when we lived in balance with our animal kin. Since we first painted their silhouettes on the walls of caves 35,000 years ago, animals have inhabited our stories, our dreams, and our imaginations.

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

Since he began creating his singular work of Ashes and Snow in 1992, Colbert has undertaken filming and photographic expeditions to every continent to collaborate with more than one hundred species around the world. Colbert, who calls animals "nature's living masterpieces," photographs and films both wild animals and those that have been habituated to human contact in their native environments. There is no digital collaging. The images record what he saw through the lens of his camera. While Colbert uses both still and movie cameras, the photographic images are not taken from the film.

His original Ashes and Snow photographic artworks marry umber and sepia tones in a distinctive encaustic process on handmade Japanese paper. Each work, approximately seven feet by twelve feet, is mounted without commentary to encourage an emotional rather than an intellectual response to the images.

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

An elephant does not see his trunk as merely a nose. It is also a trumpet. Colbert believes people tend to see cameras only as a device to take photographs. He sees cameras as musical instruments that can be played by the human eye.

The feature film was edited by two-time Oscar winner Pietro Scalia. It is narrated by Laurence Fishburne (English), Ken Watanabe (Japanese), Enrique Rocha (Spanish), and Jeanne Moreau (French). Musical collaborators include Michael Brook, David Darling, Heiner Goebbels, Lisa Gerrard, Lukas Foss, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and Djivan Gasparyan.

The title Ashes and Snow refers to the literary component of the exhibition—a fictional account of a man who, over the course of a yearlong journey, composes 365 letters to his wife. The source of the title is revealed in the 365th letter.

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

The Nomadic Museum

The Nomadic Museum restores the possibility of wonder to museums whose excesses of clarity and light have banished the shadows. The power of the show and the power of the building are so reciprocal that it is difficult to separate the dancer from the dance . . . In these agnostic and cynical times, the building becomes a place to feel and even believe. Ashes and Snow is a show that is disarmingly, and grandly, simple.

Modern Painter

When Colbert originally conceived the idea for the Nomadic Museum, he aspired to create the first 21st-century museum for nature—a place where nature is celebrated, a place where animals have a voice, a place where walls become doors that open our senses to the music of nature. Gregory Colbert’s Nomadic Museum is a purpose-built temporary structure used to house his traveling Ashes and Snow film and photography exhibition. Just as Colbert’s films and photographs depict a world without hierarchy between species, a place where there is no “other”—the Nomadic Museum also aims to be inclusive, not elitist, a democratic expression of the wonder of nature that is accessible by visitors of all cultural and social backgrounds.

 

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

To share his photographs and films, Colbert imagined a structure that could easily be assembled in ports of call around the world, providing an ephemeral environment for his work. He envisioned a building that would be the architectural equivalent of open arms, a place that would welcome rather than intimidate visitors, and would emerge seamlessly from the world of the images themselves. The Nomadic Museum resolves the disconnect that often exists between an artist’s work and the environment in which it is presented.

 

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

Colbert first presented Ashes and Snow at the Arsenale in Venice, Italy, in 2002. With his debut, Photo magazine declared, “A new master is born.” It was described as “extraordinary” by the Economist, and “distinctive . . . monumental in every sense” by the Wall Street Journal. Stern magazine described the photographs as “fascinating,” and Vanity Fair named Gregory Colbert in its “Best of the Best.” The New York Times, in an article by Alan Riding, stated, “The power of the images comes less from their formal beauty than from the way they envelop the viewer in their mood . . . They are simply windows to a world in which silence and patience govern time.”

 

 

Ashes and Snow opened in the first Nomadic Museum in 2005 in New York City. The Nomadic Museum then traveled to Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Mexico City. It is charted to migrate around the globe with no final destination.

Mexico City

“A stupendous museum brimming with poetry, from which you will no doubt come away with a remarkable sensory experience.” - Reforma

The most recent Nomadic Museum, in the Zócalo, Mexico City, was the largest bamboo structure ever created. The architect Simón Vélez designed the Mexico City Nomadic Museum, which utilized bamboo as the primary structural element of the building. Colbert designed unique interior architectural features that included suspended bamboo columns that floated above canals that lined the galleries. The roots of the bamboo were inverted in the structure so that they pointed toward the sky. Colbert has often said that the Nomadic Museum had its roots in the sky and the bamboo columns were meant to reflect that intention.

The Zócalo is the third largest square in the world and the most iconic in Latin America. It was the center of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, a city founded by the Aztecs on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco in 1325. For the first time, the Nomadic Museum incorporated water as a design element to recall the unique history of the Zócalo, which was once surrounded by canals.

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

Tokyo  

“Tokyo is such an artificial space that we who live here can gradually lose the sense that we still inhabit the natural world. When we come to the Nomadic Museum, however, we are reminded of the feelings man must have had while living with nature. The museum is a space where we can reconnect with who we really are.” - Asahi Shimbun Newspaper

The Tokyo Nomadic Museum was sited in Odaiba, an island located on the Tokyo waterfront. The Tokyo installation was a kind of homecoming for Colbert who had long worked closely with Japanese handmade paper makers for his original artworks. He had also collaborated with renowned cinematographer Koji Nakamura, who filmed the underwater scenes in which Colbert himself is the subject. The Ashes and Snow film was narrated in Japanese by Ken Watanabe.

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

Santa Monica   

“There is no clash of species in Ashes and Snow; it is a world in which man and animals peacefully co-exist, living in each other's dreams.” - Los Angeles Times Magazine

The Nomadic Museum in Santa Monica was a conversation with the Pacific Ocean. The structure incorporated many of the features and design elements of the New York Nomadic Museum while adding distinct smaller theatres to show two new short film “haikus” at the end of galleries on either side of a large central theatre.

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

New York           

“His astonishing pictures—sepia and umber in tone . . . documented the whole caravan of beauteous creatures who had passed before his magic lens . . . For all its apparent sobriety, this is an ecstatic space; as for the installation, it is Zen . . . It’s like a Rothko chapel writ large.” - Wall Street Journal

Ashes and Snow was displayed in New York in the first the Nomadic Museum. In the late 20th-century the architecture of Manhattan had turned its back on the waterfront. In hosting the Nomadic Museum on Pier 54, The Hudson River Park invited the city to turn its gaze back to the river and its piers. The first of its kind in the world, the Nomadic Museum was composed largely of recyclable and reusable materials—used shipping containers for the walls and paper tubing for the roof and columns—demonstrating sustainable practices and an innovative architectural approach within a post-industrial environment. The New York opening marked the U.S. premiere of Ashes and Snow, Colbert’s personal and artistic odyssey.

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

Venice 

“There is no way to accurately translate the English word ‘bliss’ into Italian. Yet it's this word that precisely explains the exhibition Ashes and Snow.” - La Repubblica

The debut installation of Ashes and Snow at the Arsenale in Venice, which opened in 2002, inspired the architectural concepts used in the design of the Nomadic Museum. In the 15th century the Arsenale was the biggest ship building yard in the world. At 600 meters in length it has cathedral-like proportions. Colbert’s exhibition occupied the Corderie, the Artiglierie and Gaggiandre—an unprecedented use of almost 125,000 square feet of space dedicated to the work of one artist.

 Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

Gregory Colbert (born 1960 in Toronto) is a Canadian film-maker and photographer best known as the creator ofAshes and Snow, an exhibition of photographic artworks and films housed in the Nomadic Museum. Colbert sees himself as an apprentice to nature. His works are collaborations between humans and other species that express the poetic sensibilities and imaginations of human and animals. His images offer an inclusive non-hierarchical vision of the natural world, one that depicts an interdependence and symmetry between humanity and the rest of life. In describing his vision, Colbert has said, '"I would define what I do as storytelling…what’s interesting is to have an expression in an orchestra—and I’m just one musician in the orchestra. Unfortunately, as a species we’ve turned our back to the orchestra. I’m all about opening up the orchestra, not just to other humans, but to other species.'"

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

Long before its public debut, Ashes and Snow enjoyed the support of a devoted group of private collectors and key people in the art world. In an open letter dated March 1, 1995, Charles-Henri Favrod, Director and Curator of the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, wrote, “Ashes and Snow is written in the language of dreams….The exhibition and the film are not about ‘inventing’ new images of being ‘modern.’ Instead Colbert is trying to return the image to its purest state, to touch the heart, to enchant, to remember forgotten ideals, and to show that all truth and reality is classical and eternal.”

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

In 2002, Colbert presented Ashes and Snow in Venice, Italy. An April 9, 2002 review in The Globe and Mail stated, “Colbert unveiled Ashes and Snow, an exhibition of images and photographs unprecedented in both scope and scale. Covering 12,600 square meters, it is billed as one of the largest one-man shows in the history of Europe.”

Photo: Gregory Colbert Ashes & Snow.

 

Courtesy Gregory Colbert https://gregorycolbert.com/