Here I am, on a sun-filled day in an enclosed Buddhist garden on the Pacific shore of Northern California, writing about an exhibition of snow and ice in the open spaces of Finnish Lapland…

We go to locations far from home to have experiences because experiences in our own time and place are less ‘exotic’ and we are less conscious of them. We seek out experiences as they make us feel alive and remove us from the compressed time and place of the everyday. In fact, it has become essential today to make time to reconnect, reground, recharge and then re-enter our world—and the experience of art is one of the ways to do this. We need to get away to have time to create, to write, to think, to see things (anew). By making art we offer ourselves and others a means of re-experiencing the world with a full sense of time. So, taking time by being in another place can provide an opening for creativity on the part of both maker and viewer.

Inspired by or contributing to the landscape and people of a place, site-specific shows, or  projects within international contemporary art biennials, have popped up around the world since the mid-1980s--so compelling is the realization that a place can be the basis for art.  So meaningful, too, is the relevance of these works that emerge from an artistic practice that snake its way through historical, contemporary and imagined places.  For many us, however, it is often through books like this one that we have an experience of these places. 

My first full-scale foray into site-specific exhibition making was in 1991 in Charleston, South Carolina, where, commissioned by the Spoleto Festival USA, I curated the work of twenty-three artists for ‘Places with a Past’. It is an experience that lives on with the residents of the region and in the work of some of the artists. My practice as curator is always reaffirmed when, encountering someone I’ve not met before, they recount their experience of their favourite project and describe the installation in form and feeling with great detail. But, I also continue to be amazed by the vitality of similar experiences I hear about based on the publication alone. This is the achievement of The Snow Show book, too: it is not only an exhibition catalogue but also an actual experience, proving that the artists’ and architects’ ideas have not completely evaporated.

One of the things that makes ‘The Snow Show’ so unique as an artistic proposition is the challenge of place and media. Another uncommon characteristic is that artists and architects were asked to work together, interacting with a physical landscape, a cultural environment, materials, and with each other. The conditions presented new ways of working, offers of time to dream, to innovate and to create. Despite the hassle that getting out of the office, home, the everyday can be, and the hassle that airports have become, boarding a plane can launch new possibilities as time and space open up. And, for the visitor who made the passage to ‘The Snow Show’ or for those native to the area, the work allowed them moments in which to pause and to take time to see in a new way.

Snow and ice as the materials of art and architecture are the outrageously exciting part. How to marshal these uncommon, unfamiliar and, above all, transitory elements? They are the quintessential media to command focused creativity. The project demanded and evoked a transformation of substance as well as place. The teams speak of this over and over again, for example, Lawrence Weiner and Enrique Norten see their project as ‘a discontinuous composition with an open-ended result…to describe content and absence beyond time and space’.This extraordinary achievement is the exhibition’s ‘wow factor’. More than this, it is the nature of the material – open, fluid, always changing, possessing multiple states, malleable but never completely under control – that makes the experience at once palpable and profound. It is the brilliance of the chosen media that creates, on the one hand, a sense of being in the here and now and, on the other hand, an illusion or a dream. Transmutability, ambiguity and associative meanings are rich, and this book offers new layers of experience.

Just as the characteristics of site, media and collaboration add value to the projects, resulting in a greater vitality of engagement in the making and heightened experience in the finished viewing, so, correspondingly, they magnify the complexity of the task. Hence, greater perseverance, trust and belief were required on the part of the organizers, in particular curator Lance Fung, who conceived and sustained his vision through the travails of the show’s realization.