"Ice," says artist Zaria Forman, "crackles and pops."  It's a visual image of "familiarity" amidst the remote.  "It's a really beautiful sound."  Forman's paintings, always done in pastels, mostly blues and whites, portray snow, glaciers, and ice.  They reimage some of the harshest and most isolated places on the planet, mixing frigid blue oceans with white calving icebergs in striking portraits of wonder, vulnerability, and terror.
     Wonder?  This is easy:  the sheer magnitude of our planet's sheets of ice rightly inspire awe.  But terror?  Absolutely:  the terror of loss, of distance, of vanished time.  The annals of polar explorers, North or South, speak eloquently and about the unspeakable isolation these lands engender, the way they swallow all sense of space and passage.

     Vulnerability, well, this seems obvious:  little can we do to make any sense of these massively powerful stories of snow and ice.  So does Forman's art remind us of our very human vulnerability before the places and patterns of the planet.  We are in awe of our world, yet helpless to explain it fully.
     When we overlook our vulnerability, when we forget our human humility, when we stop being honest about who we are, we step into another terror, the terror of confidence, the frightening confidence that we, and we alone, are the arbiters of the ways of the planet.
     How we delude ourselves in imagining that we know more than that from which we came.