Terra Montane
2025, 15-minute digital video
This fifteen-minute film was commissioned by the Sun Valley Museum of Art in conjunction with their SNOW SHOW: Winter Now exhibition and the 2025 World Cup Alpine Championships in Sun Valley. This cinematic tour explores some of the earth’s most dynamic terrains where geology, ice, and altitude collaborate to ceaselessly sculpt new landscapes. After an overture featuring an eighteenth-century maquette of Mont Blanc, the first half of the film explores landscapes that were photographed for photogrammetric visualizations where animated point clouds render the scenes ascending the heights of Cascade volcanoes. Following an interlude through an ice cave, the second half of the film explores the American epicenter of glacier-making in Alaska through point clouds pieced together from archival imagery shot over 15 years ago. The virtual cinematography tools developed by Glowbox reveal Nan Shepherd’s immersive insight that “a mountain has an inside.” An immersive environmental installation of the video is part of the Zero Celsius exhibition at Mad River Valley Arts (2026).
“Brad Johnson’s 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…the images convey our attempts to understand a glacial environment even as it is vanishing.”—Alice Dodge, “Pretty Polarized: Winter Is Worth Seeing in ‘Zero Celsius’”
