K.A. COLORADO BIOGRAPHY
International artist and sculptor K.A. Colorado has spent the last two decades working in various climatic conditions throughout the world, using ice and snow as both a medium and subject, constructing corrugated paper and steel forms, carving giant stone in alpine regions, and working in Antarctica and the Patagonia ice fields. His work has taken him atop precarious icebergs, alongside rugged mountains, and into the hot desert. From creating snow sculpture in Valois, France, to fabricating steel pyramids in Culiacan, Mexico, to sculpting monumental stone in the Czech Republic, to having one of his Ice Core Sculptures imbedded in the cauldron of a volcano in South America, K.A. Colorado has performed art applications all around the globe and created art that has dealt with the global conditions associated with climate change. Recipient of the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum LA Artcore Award in 2008, K.A. Colorado’s work has joined science and art together aesthetically, conceptually, and intellectually, and explored the historical and human ramifications of our changing climate and environment.
K.A. Colorado has been working with ice, snow, iceberg, and ice core art for over twenty years. His work has included on-site ice and snow sculptures and art performances all over the world, as well as multiple in- studio series of massive paintings and sculptures depicting icebergs, ice cores, climate phenomena, environmental conditions, and human situations. The art of K.A. Colorado portrays the links, clues, juxtapositions, and cross-sections of nature, science, and the human condition. Its subjects touch upon our past, our present, and our future.
In 2004, K.A. Colorado traveled to the Antarctic where he was invited by the Arctic Scientific Research Library to study icebergs. The group of scientists there was interested in the artist’s accurate artistic portrayals and paintings that visually captured icebergs and depicted their in-context locations. K.A. Colorado was the only artist sponsored to visit the Antarctic and its ice fields by the Arctic Scientific Research Library and Dr. Jorge Rabassa, Director of CADIC-CONICET – Laboratorio de Geologia del Cuaternario – in Ushuaia, Argentina in the Tierra del Fuego region.
K.A. Colorado has also worked with ice and snow in countries all over the globe, including Russia, Finland, Japan, France, Switzerland, and the United States. He has organized and judged international snow competitions, and was founder of the Winter Arts Festival and Ice and Snow Competition in the Perm region of Russia in Western Siberia in 1996.
As the only artist invited among a group of renowned scientists and climatologists from around the world, K.A. Colorado participated in the International Conference on Hydrometeorological Security held in Moscow, Russia in September 2006. His paper on Aesthetic Considerations and Implications of Snow Mass and Texture Changes was published and posted at the Conference, which was attended by climatologists and geologists whose areas of expertise included the polar and arctic regions.
In November 2007, K.A. Colorado was again invited to participate in an international conference, this one entitled the Polar Archives Conference and Symposium and held at the British Library in London, England, where his paper entitled An Aesthetic Dialogue on Current Questions of Polar Climate Conditions was posted.
K.A. Colorado’s on-site art installations include performance art on actual icebergs that explores the themes of human habitat, nature, and boundaries, and compares and contrasts human habitat with the natural architecture and structure found on natural ice mass and in nature. He performed the first known Kinetic Snow Sculpture which featured the designing and carving of an elaborate maze of thirty 6-foot-tall snow blocks which systematically moved in a domino-like effect, ending in a break-through of a solid ice wall. This Kinetic Snow Sculpture performance took place in Perm, Russia, and also served as a creative tool to measure the moisture content in the snow. His "Ice Core Art Program" records and documents the cultural perspectives of individuals from various countries through conducting class courses and student surveys and imbedding the students’ comments or "cultural data" into glass replicas of ice core samplings. And his "Ice Core Science Sculptures" series features ice core sampling replicas with imbedded published text written by such known scientists as Dr. Jorge Rabassa, Director of CADIC- CONICET in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, and Dr. Alexander Vasiliev, renowned scientist with the Hydrometeorological Center of Russia in Moscow, Russian Federation.
In addition, K.A. Colorado’s "Ice Cores in Warm Terrain" project features the creation and installation of art pieces depicting ice cores in regional warm zones and desert terrain, contrasting warm and cold in climate, society, and culture.
K.A. Colorado’s paintings include: The "Iceberg" series that captures the spirit of the iceberg and immortalizes icebergs as a vanishing species; the "Ice Core" series that portrays ice cores both as scientific samplings which tell the environmental/biological history of the earth and as metaphorical samplings that tell the "data" of human culture and history; the "Requiem" series which visually notes the disappearance of arctic, polar, and cold climate conditions; and the "Texas T" series which features oil paintings about the pursuit of hydrocarbon and earth’s treasures, and evokes a sense of the earth itself being our primary treasure, while combining culture with environment, land mass with ice mass, natural resources with human-made resources, and technological ingenuity with the ramifications for the future.
Currently K.A. Colorado is developing several projects in the Tierra del Fuego region of Argentina and in Antarctica together with the Argentine Ministry of Culture, Education, Science & Technology, including: A ship-ice safety program featuring a documentary film, educational text books, and academic program material; an art-and-science education program for all levels of schools and universities, including a series of lectures, classes, and field course work; and an ice core art project and cultural exchange program.
In October 2008, K.A. Colorado was honored by the LA Artcore Museum at their Annual Banquet in Los Angeles, where he was recognized for his art and international work in climate-related issues and environmental concerns.
In April 2009, a climbing expedition team in South America imbedded a K.A. Colorado “Kyoto Protocol Dialogue” Ice Core Sculpture in the cauldron of Volcano Pillan near the border of Argentina and Chile. Upcoming shows for K.A. Colorado in 2009 and 2010 include a solo exhibition at the LA Artcore Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles, California, and a special solo exhibition at the international headquarters of the humanitarian organization, Mercy Corps, in Portland, Oregon. The artist is also currently working on a book exploring the moral, social, and scientific implications of the politicization of climate change, climate study, and climate issues. He hopes his art work will help increase the understanding of our relationship to the environment and represent the joining together of human and environmental history, cultural and climate study, and natural art and science.
"Through visually depicting the ice, arctic, and polar conditions, and working with weather phenomenon in cold regions, as well as documenting individuals’ response to cold and scientific study of extreme cold, I feel I am creating art that represents humanity, science, and nature linking together. Extreme cold is part of the balance that makes up our environmental and our human condition, and as climate change reduces cold so too does it alter our social condition and interaction with the environment and with each other.""As a sculptor and painter, I have been given the opportunity to develop my art on the climate subject, and hope to expand the relationship of visual arts to the beauty, fragility, and relationship of climate. I also believe that an enlightened and empowered individual is a crucial element in the current question on climate. I believe the ability to portray and dramatize climate as fundamental to beauty, light, and international relations is achieved through artistic exploration and understanding."
— K.A. Colorado
Ice Cores by K.A. Colorado are copyrighted and registered, including copyright with the Library of Congress and registration with the Writers Guild of America.