Categories: Entertainment and Attractions Museums

Museum of Modern Ice

Author: Alison Fiebig

Throughout February 2008, Millennium Park will play host to the Museum of Modern Ice, a public ice-painting exhibition, warming up the chilly Chicago season with vibrant colors and staggering icy statues. Canadian artist Gordon Halloran has put a whole new meaning into abstract art.

The month-long, world-class exhibit, Paintings Below Zero, is making its U.S. debut in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Halloran, whose resume includes representing Canada at the Cultural Olympiad of the Olympic Winter Games in Turin, is bringing to Chicago his largest installation to date, measuring in at 95-feet-long and 12-feet-tall.

One side will be visible from Michigan Avenue, boldly reflecting the city’s skyline; the other allows visitors to come into close proximity of the colorfully complex, icy formation. Halloran will also incorporate an abstract ice painting within the Park’s McCormick Tribune Ice Rink, allowing visitors to skate on its multi-colored surface. The enormous, yet intricate, installation and ice rink will be available for all to enjoy free of charge.

Located at one of Chicago’s most popular public arenas, the festival of multi-faceted, colorful ice is displayed in a thick, vertical ice sheet—an ice wall. With a combination of technology and art, the mosaic mimics a glacial wall in its final stages of movement toward the ocean.

Halloran’s award-winning illustrating career started with designing covers for magazines (Macleans, Toronto Life, San Francisco), ultimately leading to his connection with art in this unique medium. His obsession for combining paint and ice stems from his boyhood, watching a hockey practice. Playing pickup hockey games with his brothers, he grew fond of the way ice freezes and forms. Soon, his ideas turned into a science, where Halloran employs a variety of techniques to produce his creations. Taking it a step further, Halloran discovered that a Zamboni worked excellent as an etching device, working the colors in over the glistening surface of his ice canvas.

To produce his massive ice paintings, Halloran utilizes portable refrigeration technology, using modular aluminum plates that efficiently conduct the cold. The slabs, once assembled into the proper configurations, help to maintain and move the structures no matter the temperature.

Millennium Park, dedicated to celebrating the arts, will support the exhibit until February 29. Throughout the festival, the public can embrace the winter season every weekend in the Park with ice-inspired activities in a heated tent or across the street in the Chicago Cultural Center Hot Spot, including: electronic and acoustic music performances and related visuals projected on the Ice Max Theater, a six-by-10-foot frozen video wall with an ice bar serving samples of alcohol-free drinks; family activities such as hands-on art and science projects presented by Chicago's most popular museums. Engage in a celebration of ancient Winter Carnival tradition featuring a lantern procession through the park.

Every Saturday and Sunday during the festival there will be thirty-minute guided tours of the installation from 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m., as well as family activities such as ice games and ice portraits by professional ice sculptors, from noon-4 p.m. on Saturday and noon-3 p.m. on Sundays. All events are free.