Childlike does not have to mean shallow or cloyingly sweet. Two New York artists have been experimenting with snowglobes, those glass balls filled with water, glitter and a small scene.
Most snowglobes are a cliche, without much surprise and certainly no contemplation. As I child, I loved to stare in them and imagine journeys. Thanks to a pointer from Kim Carney's blog, I have found a whole series of snowglobes by Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz that not only have the mystery of my youth, but go way beyond in possibilities to ponder.
"Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, in their recent work entitled Travelers, reconstruct the journey as transition, adventure or mishap and they monumentalize it by means of a snowglobe, a symbol of souvenir and memory, which since the 19th Century, has aimed to capture the beauty of the snowscape and the silhouette of cities in a winter fantasy.
The snowglobe seems to encapsulate in a fictional mockup that quaint, kitsch tale of the sublime experience as a formulation to popularise the intensity of the romantic journey.
Each of these snowglobes has been constructed and designed to contain a snowy tale that is later on photographed. Inside the sphere, life becomes a transition to nowhere, characters appear lost in a hostile environment and vainly try to find a path which has ceased to exist: they are a metaphor for the modern world, constructed as a continuous landscape of spaces of transit and paths, lines of communication or waiting areas....
The work of Martin and Muñoz certainly connects with these proposals of a constructed reality to the extent to which it acts as a mock-up, but on the other hand distances itself from them by tackling a world of fantasy, inscribed on the imaginary and without contact with the credible, putting to one side any bleeding between reality and fiction. Their winter no-lands are spaces which take in the imaginary occurrence of small individual disasters, extolled as monuments of daily desolation
Schubert’s Winterreise isn’t a journey through a landscape, but an itinerary of feelings and passions which lead to an interior which is both shredded and wished for, a decisive journey which leads to one’s own rescue. In this way, the snowglobes in Travelers construct a journey to the interior of fear. The snowglobe is only apparently innocent: it contains black humor, it’s an impossible tale of modern terrors. Travelers who haul their suitcases through the snow, a couple meet and embrace, blessed out, on the tip of an impossible iceberg, a couple who drag a prefabricated cottage through an inhospitable winter or some drivers detained by a soldier amidst a snowfall...." Winter Journey by Santiago B. Olmo
