From May 19 to August 11, 2007, the Santa Monica Museum of Art’s Project Room 1 presents Iceberg: Richard Carter and Margaret Pezalla-Granlund, two independent bodies of work about a topic that has captivated artists throughout time. Iceberg marks the first Southern California museum exhibition for Carter and Pezalla-Granlund. Carter’s paintings and drawings of icebergs in the exhibition are in a variety of dimensions. Pezalla-Granlund’s iceberg sculptures are formed from paper and foam core. In the intimate space of Project Room 1, the two treatments of icebergs resonate with one another—Carter’s lush paintings appear and then seem to melt away through Pezalla-Granlund’s slightly shifting sea of ghostly iceberg presences—immersing the viewer in the awe and mystery of their subject matter.

Carter had long been fascinated with Frederic Edwin Church’s painting The Iceberg, as well as the drawings and watercolors of 18th- and 19th-century explorers of the Polar Regions. He started to introduce icebergs in his work in 2000 with two paintings he created primarily as an exploration of the polar night sky. Through a subsequent series of graphite on watercolor works, Carter found himself using icebergs as a defining foreground element. Since that time, he has created a range of work that reveals the grandeur, magnificent beauty, and dramatic sculptural quality of these natural forms. Ranging in size from the small to the monumental, Carter’s pieces reveal the unique character and personality of a particular iceberg. Whether in acrylic or graphite, the work communicates the icebergs’ many attributes—poetic and atmospheric, as well as stark and foreboding. Carter looks to a diverse range of visual sources as references—from the National Geographic Society, to the U.S. and Canadian Coast Guards, and to the International Ice Patrol. In response to growing realities of climate change and global warming, the artist sometimes situates icebergs in his work where they do not appear naturally, at least for now—New York City’s East River, and the Santa Monica and San Francisco Bays.

Pezalla-Granlund’s focus on icebergs grew quite unexpectedly out of her interest in parking ramps, structures which facilitate travel through three dimensions on a single plane. She began to model icebergs as a way to study similar forces while working with organic, rather than built forms. Simultaneously, her new-found concentration on icebergs also allowed her to explore the unfamiliar and the unseen—the often enormous hidden portion of the iceberg that extends far below the surface of the water. Pezalla-Granlund’s icebergs are shaped out of Bristol board—a stiff, cardstock-like paper—laid over a foam core structure. Fragile and irregular, their material construction is lightweight and easily crushed—a purposeful opposition to their real-world counterparts. Suspended from the ceiling in the gallery space of the Project Room 1, five icebergs of varied dimension and mass float flat side up, with the asymmetrical, jutting edges extending towards the floor, compelling the viewer to navigate around them as they would in the polar environment.

From his earliest days, Richard Carter’s visits to museums in New York inspired him to pursue a career in the arts. After graduating from Villanova University, Carter moved to Aspen, Colorado, where he worked as an assistant to artist Herbert Bayer and also pursued his own art practice. Throughout the years, Carter has been actively involved in supporting the arts in myriad ways, from directing a commercial art gallery, to helping found the Aspen Art Museum. He has also maintained a prominent career as a production designer for commercials, television, and film. Carter has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. His work is in many private and corporate collections. Carter lives and works in Santa Monica, California and Basalt, Colorado.

Minneapolis-based Margaret Pezalla-Granlund is a graduate of St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California. Pezalla-Granlund has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, most recently at Augsburg College, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, Minnesota. She is interested in modeling the complex spaces of the natural and built landscape in two and three dimensional media. Pezalla-Granlund is currently exploring this fascination by focusing her work on icebergs, parking ramps, and skate parks.