Pretty Polarized: Winter Is Worth Seeing in ‘Zero Celsius’

Snow comes across as a phenomenon that, in the face of climate change, needs to be valued before it melts once and for all.

I have never made sense of Groundhog Day. I’m fine with the idea of long-term weather forecasting via rodent, but the idea that winter could ever be over by March is downright fantastical. Even as we gain sunlight and puddles, the ever-present chance of a blizzard or subzero snap means I won’t put away the snow pants until May.

The question that’s top-of-mind for many Vermonters — When will winter end? — takes on a deeper, longer-term meaning at “Zero Celsius,” a group exhibition on view through April 23 at Mad River Valley Arts in Waitsfield, with a few works installed at Sugarbush Resort in nearby Warren. In this show, snow hasn’t lost its luster; instead, the works highlight its natural beauty and its complex relationship to culture. It comes across as a phenomenon that, in the face of climate change, needs to be valued before it melts once and for all.

Cocurators Sam Talbot-Kelly and Beth Bingham modeled the exhibition on one produced last year at the Sun Valley Museum of Art in Idaho titled “SNOW SHOW: Winter Now.” Talbot-Kelly invited three of that show’s five artists to present their works again in “Zero Celsius,” alongside smaller contributions by artists from Vermont and New England. The show also includes skis made by Boston custom ski manufacturer Parlor and vintage outdoor gear lent by the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum in Stowe.

Most of the gallery space is given over to a media room where visitors can rest on ski resort-esque wooden benches to watch two looping video installations. The first of these, “The Word for Weather Is Knowledge,” is a short film, just under 15 minutes, by Los Angeles artist Rob Reynolds. On Saturday, March 14, Mad River Valley Arts will screen the film at Big Picture Community Hub for the Arts in Waitsfield, followed by a conversation between Reynolds and Ripton environmentalist and author Bill McKibben.

Projected across one entire wall of the gallery, the film shows images of icebergs and water shot from a small open boat in Greenland in summer 2019. No people are pictured, other than the occasional shadow of the boat and its crew across the snow, but there is an English-subtitled voiceover narrative in Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) by Claus Foss Hansen, the local boat driver.

The film’s visuals are spectacular. The icebergs are reflected in the placid, mirrorlike surface of the water. Perpetual sunset illuminates the snow and ice with glowing pinks and an unreal deep blue. Some scenes, filmed from above, show chunks of ice bobbing along and breaking up; in others, the icebergs tower at impossible scale.

Reynolds is also a painter, and some of his other works — including one presented alongside the film in “SNOW SHOW” — reference historical maritime paintings of ships and shipwrecks. The documentary’s imagery seems to be a direct descendant of romantic portrayals of the Arctic, such as Frederic Edwin Church’s hit 1861 painting “The Icebergs.” At the time, the far north had captured public imagination as a place of both beauty and horror; Sir John Franklin’s expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the 1840s had resulted in the slow, horrible deaths of everyone aboard his ships, HMS Erebus and Terror, locked in ice for two years.

In Reynolds’ film, the speaker highlights the perils of ignoring the weather and climate (as Franklin did) by describing the changes he has noticed — shorter winters, smaller icebergs — and a key Kalaallisut cultural concept: sila. The word means weather, but also a general awareness of climate and the weather that’s coming, and how to stay responsive to it, as the speaker describes it. “You can’t limit the word sila only to weather … such as snow, or rain. It also refers to how a person thinks.”

Brad Johnson’s “Terra Montane,” a six-channel video installation also looping in the gallery, likewise grapples with how we conceptualize a melting landscape but from a very different perspective. Through overlapping projections and with an atmospheric, experimental soundtrack, Johnson gives us images of mountains and ice caves, both real and made from animations of data points measuring the terrain. The information is rendered as a ghostly topography, seemingly both there and absent; part of the film is based on an 18th-century model of Mont Blanc. As with Reynolds’ documentary, the images convey our attempts to understand a glacial environment even as it is vanishing.

In the other half of the gallery, Sofía Jaramillo focuses her camera on who’s in the landscape. In a series of crisp, polished black-and-white images, she re-creates classic 1960s-era ski photos, featuring gender-nonconforming and LGBTQ people and models of color as her subjects. The photographer has a Colombian background and grew up in Sun Valley, Idaho, where mid-20th-century resort photos shaped a perception of the ski slopes as altogether too white. In her reimaginings, diverse skiers have always been part of the scene. Talbot-Kelly has reinforced this message by installing some of Jaramillo’s images as banner-size prints at Sugarbush Resort.

Alongside these three main installations, the show includes winter-centric works by 14 local artists. Julie Parker’s photos of ice crystals play on the concept of “polarized.” A torn-photo collage by Hooey Wilks conveys the sharpness of winter mountain air; a triptych of 6-inch paintings by Mary Admasian, the drama of a melting lake.

Though they’re a little overshadowed by the more monumental presentations, these smaller contributions — which include traditional snowy landscapes and more abstract interpretations — are worth spending some time with. Remind yourself just how beautiful winter can be, before it’s mud season. ➆

“Zero Celsius,” on view through April 23 at Mad River Valley Arts in Waitsfield. Rob Reynolds and Bill McKibben in conversation, Saturday, March 14, 3:30-5:30 p.m., at the Big Picture Community Hub for the Arts in Waitsfield. $30. madrivervalleyarts.org

The original print version of this article was headlined “Pretty Polarized | Winter is worth seeing in “Zero Celsius” at Mad River Valley Arts”

This article appears in March 11 • 2026.

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