Nadis: Portrait of a Cambridge Artist -on and off the ice

By Steve Nadis/Cambridge On My Mind
Reprinted from Wicked Local Cambridge

May 3, 2010

After seeing someone at the skating rink 100 times, you think you know something about them. They have two legs, just like the rest of us, but in place of feet they have funny shoes with metal blades sticking out the bottom. Occasionally, you might get a glimpse into another side of that individual. That happened to me a week or so ago, when I went to Diane Norris’s opening at the Sacramento Street Gallery. That’s when I discovered there was more to this person than I’d realized from all times I’d seen her last winter at the Cambridge Skating Club. When she’s not doing pirouettes at the rink, she is, by her own estimation, a half-time architect, half-time mother, and half-time artist. In addition to all those halves (plus a few quarters and eighths I didn’t mention), she’s got interests that go far beyond skating—extending to ice itself.

Her art show, called “Glacier,” illustrates her longstanding fascination with water, ice, and snow. It demonstrates, among other things, that these substances can assume many different forms—all of which can be beautiful in their own ways. When I skate, I constantly think about the quality of ice—whether it’s smooth or rough, soft or hard, and whether it’s going to somehow catapult me onto my derrière. Or worse. Norris takes a more aesthetic approach, looking at the patterns etched into icy surfaces and the continual changes caused by reflections, shifting shadows, swirling snow, and the passage of humans bearing skates.

While viewing her stunning work in this area, I was reminded of a passage from “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” which said that Eskimo languages have dozens of words for ice and snow, whereas we have just a couple. The show includes paintings, drawings, and photographs of ice and snow, in various configurations, inspired by Norris’s visits to Mount Rainier, Glacier National Park, Cape Cod, and—in our own backyard–Fresh Pond. She sees these spots as “natural places of extraordinary power” and “timelessness, which are currently caught in a state of unexpected change and fragility.”

This is one of the ideas Norris is trying to get across, although she hopes that comes across as more of an undercurrent than an explicit statement. While glaciers are, by definition, long-lived masses of snow and ice, they also have a transitory nature, steadily advancing and retreating and, in many places of the world, disappearing altogether. If current trends hold, she says, in another 10 years, the only glacier left in Glacier National Park may be in the park’s name, which will likely be retained for historic purposes only.

I admit, I don’t see art as much as I ought to. For no reason, really, other than my own set routines that somehow fill the day, leaving me one step behind in everything I do. That’s why I enjoyed taking in this show. I saw how an artist can cast snow and ice in an entirely new, and visually alluring, light—a revelation for someone like me who mainly thinks about keeping my sidewalk clear of those items, using whatever technology I can, so I don’t get sued by the mailman or an enterprising neighbor. When I saw Norris’s ink depictions of snowfields, something clicked: I could tell they were in the style of Chinese landscape paintings, almost as if they were drawn in a foreign language.

This was more than just a typical opening. It was a veritable happening. While the show was underway, “hard-hat tours” were being conducted at the Maud Morgan Visual Arts Center under construction in the back yard—a dazzling display of two-by-fours bound to excite any tool belt-carrying Home Depot habitué. Meanwhile, artists from all over Cambridge were descending on the gallery and the Agassiz Baldwin Community center to celebrate Open Studio day. You might call it a harmonic convergence with Norris and her show—and me and other hangers-on by extension—right there in the middle of it.

No one would believe I was at such a fashionable gathering, unless I could somehow document my Zelig moment. When I mentioned to Norris that I might write this up in my so-called “humor” column, she worried that the situation might not offer enough in the way of laughs. “Have you seen my frozen frogs?” she asked, referring to photos of hapless creatures caught in a flash freeze at Fresh Pond. I decided not to touch that one, as I’d already heard plenty from local waterfowl partisans regarding my recent screed on endangered camels. The last thing I needed was to get the amphibian lobby on my back.

Columnist Steve Nadis enjoyed his 15 minutes in the center of the Cambridge arts world. Diane Norris’s show, “Glacier,” will have a considerably longer run (from April 19 to May 21) at the Sacramento Street Gallery, located at 20 Sacramento St.