Go with the floe

MANILA, Philippines - At first, they strike you with their cold formality. Jagged fissures criss-crossing a square. A ghost of a movement, a shadow of substance. Each image could be an X-ray, the delicate fibers of a ruined fabric, or the chalk markings of a schizophrenic. But as the exhibit title “Frozen II” suggests, it’s something more chaotic that was captured, some wild howling of nature that Tom Epperson was witness to, and privileged enough to record. Two years ago, the photographer traveled to Mongolia, where he stayed for a month in the Gobi desert, and where, as his wife Jenni describes, he survived negative 40-degree weather, lived among strangers in gers, slept with goats, and ate horse meat, mutton, and yak testicles. He didn’t come with a plan, but just lived as a nomad, like the Mongolians.

These photographs are the product of those 30 days and nights spent in the desert — without cell signal — removed from everyone and everything that was familiar and loved. Imagine this man standing on a frozen lake, listening to the ice shift and slide beneath his feet, as he waits, and snow falls. These “cold,” frozen frames are some of the most emotional images a series of abstracts can be, haunting the viewer with the mysteries of nature and leaving you with the feeling that you’ve just glimpsed a crack in the universe, and the universe in a crack.

This exhibit follows Epperson’s highly successful show “12 Below” at Tyler Rollins gallery in New York City, where he explored objects of our civilization as discovered embalmed in ice, by the inhabitants of a future ice age. As someone who’s grown up around the Great Lakes in Ohio, he’s no stranger to the flux and floes of frosty water. We can’t wait to see what he has chilling in the bin next.

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For more on “Frozen II,” read Gino de la Paz’s Q&A with Tom Epperson in tomorrow’s issue of Supreme.