Co-curated by professors of art and science, “Flows of Reflectivity” brings together these distinct disciplines through recent and historic photographs and a time-lapse video of glaciers. The exhibit explores glacier change, with an emphasis on understanding reflectivity—the capacity of ice to send incoming light back into the atmosphere—through an exploration of both the artistic dimension of sight and the scientific concept of albedo (the fraction of sunlight a surface reflects). It investigates the question “how do we see?” and explores how humans perceive changes in the natural world. For Patricia Maurides, curator and professor of practice in the department of art at Stony Brook University, “seeing” itself can be an act of imagination and connection.
On display at the Simons Center Gallery at Stony Brook University in New York, the show features photographs and videos by Maurides and Karina Yager, an associate professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. It also showcases a time-lapse video by James Balog and reproductions of historic photographs by geologist and pilot Robert Shippee and Navy lieutenant and aerial photographer George Johnson.
The exhibit uses its interdisciplinary perspective to dive into the phenomenon of albedo. With glaciers, ice sheets and snow-covered ground reflecting the highest fraction of light from Earth, ice albedo is a critical element in regulating global climate. Taken individually and as a coherent whole, the works in the show invite viewers to consider perception as a dynamic and interpretive process.
“Flows of Reflectivity” spotlights the connections between ecological transformation and human perception across varied temporalities, landscapes and artworks. The collaboration between its curators forges a crucial connection between art and science, bridging lived experiences with scientific observations of the natural world.
In one example, the curators positioned a recent photograph with a historic image to invite reflection on the pair. “Apu” (2019) by Yager is located diagonally across the gallery from an aerial photograph of glaciers in the Cordillera Vilcanota, Peru, part of a 1931 series taken during a Shippee-Johnson aerial photography expedition. In Yager’s expeditions to Peru, she re-photographed glaciers and archival aerial images following the original flight path of the historic expedition.
The title “Apu” comes from the Quechua word for “mountain deity.” Yager’s work reflects her collaboration with Indigenous communities in Peru to engage with the spiritual and cultural significance of glacier landscapes. In retracing historic flight routes and re-photographing the same glaciers, she emphasizes that for many Indigenous communities, glaciers are sentient beings, making glacier retreat a change of cosmological significance. Rather than replicate the detached lenses of scientific documentation, Yager invites viewers to understand “Apu” through ways of seeing that are intimate and grounded in lived experiences.
While art depicting landscapes is not new, as Julie Reiss, an art historian who teaches in Columbia University’s M.S. in Sustainability Management program, told GlacierHub, “we can look back at what relationship was being suggested even by those early landscapes. What land was it? Whose land was it? What would that land have meant to people?” Reiss added.
Viewers of “Apu” not only visually confront glacier retreat in the Cordillera Vilcanota in Peru, more than 80 years later, but also reckon with how people experience such transformations of the landscape. Apus are spiritual caretakers and protectors of the community, Yager explained, and Indigenous communities are “in relationships with the Apus.” This perspective shifts how one sees glaciers. It reveals that seeing is not merely empirical, but a practice shaped by imagination, connection, experiences and relationships.
Scientific photography documents specific transformations, while “artistic approaches open space for inquiry, imagination and embodied experience,” Maurides and Yager said. This deeper inquest into how we see the changing natural landscape runs throughout “Flows of Reflectivity.”
Another work that plays on the relationship between art and science is “Alchemy of Light.” In this image, Maurides explores the behavior of light using prisms, magnifiers and reflective Mylar to shape reflectivity in the natural world. Maurides seeks to invite viewers to see in a different manner, drawing on both the human eye and technology. Maurides’ photographic composition attempts to condense the cinematic flow of these “optical experiments” into a single image. She approaches photography “not as a tool for documentation, but as a living space for inquiry, experimentation and play.”
Maurides views photography as a portal—“a space that honors the diversity of human experience, nurtures a deeper sense of belonging within the natural world, and makes visible what is often unseen, unfamiliar or overlooked.” In “Flows of Reflectivity,” visitors are invited to step inside this portal and consider how perception shapes their relationship to the world around them, and how photography and art may both reveal and transform that relationship.
“Flows of Reflectivity” is on display until July 11, 2025 at the Simons Center Gallery at Stony Brook University.