HAL GAGE SELECTED AND PUBLISHED IN OUR PRINT EDITION 10
Over eons, glaciers travel from mountain tops in their slow, unrelenting march to the seas. Grinding rock to powder and carving valleys in their wake, they create the landscapes we see today.
These “rivers of ice” scoured rock and soil from valley walls carrying that debris in its icy grip. At the terminus moraine all these elements commingle, suspended in the melt waters of the receding glacier. There is beauty here, but these intrinsic abstract forms are indirect evidence of the global ramifications of this alarming trend. Their swirls and sinews change by the millisecond. Patterns in the flowing mud and silt are the vanishing fingerprint of a glacier. These transitory images are all that is left as the ice disappears and the waters dry up—leaving just a hint of the glacier that once was.
About Hal Gage
American photographer b. 1959. Born Harold L. Gage Jr, (goings by Hal) . From an early age, Hal Gage showed a love of art and music. In high school and college he studied drawing, painting, and music theory and ultimately public communications with an emphasis on television broadcasting. In 1977, Gage was introduced to photography by his painting mentor, thereafter focusing his interest on photography. Gage has mounted dozens of solo exhibitions and been in hundreds of group exhibitions between 1979 and the present. In 2004 he mounted his first museum exhibition, “Ice: a personal meditation.” It subsequently toured the state of Alaska to museums in Fairbanks, Homer, Juneau, and finally to Portland, OR. In 2011 Gage mounted two followup series titled “Strangers: Tidal Erratics of Turnagain Arm” and “Ice Abstractions” that toured in Alaska. Most recently the series, “Flow: Glacial Silt Patterns” is touring Alaska. It was featured in the LensWork anthology, Seeing in Sixes, and several exhibitions and competitions nationally and internationally.
Hal Gage has published 5 books of his work: Ice: a passage through time; Strangers: Tidal Erratics of Turnagain Arm; Gravel Quarries: Alaska; Urban Dance; and Train Trip. Gage has won several national and international awards including the Sony World Photography Award in landscape photography. He has twice been honored with a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Fellowship, and produced four public art commissions in Alaska and Washington. His work has been exhibited extensively throughout Alaska, and has shown in Canada, Eastern and Western Russia, England, Germany, East Asia, and numerous venues throughout the United States. He lives with his partner the writer Jean Ayers, in Anchorage, Alaska. [Official Website]
