A Mind of Winter: Photographs by Abelardo Morell

Abelardo Morell, Panorama of Winter Woods, 2015, color negatives and color ink on glass cliché verre.

It is not photographer Abelardo Morell’s fault that his Bowdoin College Museum of Art residency took place last winter or that he happened to choose that season as the subject for his commission. While some of us might be reluctant to return to the snowbound world of our recent past, it would be a mistake to avoid “A Mind of Winter” on the grounds of frost-bitten memories.

The 12 large archival inkjet prints, three of them black ink on glass cliché verre, are stunning evocations of a world of snow and ice and bare trees. Morell uses the blanket of white as a canvas for several images. In Bending Tree Trunk, a section of tree forms a curve against the white—like a slightly bent stovepipe stretching from bottom to top of this five-foot-tall piece.

At times Morell edges into abstraction via the descriptive. Rock and Snow presents a gray outcropping accented with strokes of snow. The image recalls the later semi-abstract watercolors of William Thon.

The three cliché-verre pieces are the stars here: inventive and visually compelling. Morell added ink to glass, which he then shaped with brushes, rollers and other tools. The remarkable Vertical Landscape, comprised of three seamlessly stacked panels (for a total of 96 inches), evokes a waterfall, the brushed fur of some winter beast, the face of a remote cliff scraped by the elements.

In Panorama of Winter Woods, Morell combined color negatives with color ink on glass cliché verre. This expansive (41½ by 96 inches) piece combines the real with the invented: a thick stand of thin trees on the left shifts into what looks like a section of static in the middle and then back to the actual forest on the right. Winter, Morell, seems to say, intensifies our vision even as it leads to visions.

For this visitor, piped-in music detracted from the experience of the show. While the Wallace Stevens poem “The Snow Man,” which inspired Morell, references “the sound of the land,” these prints require the quiet of contemplation in order to behold “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”