The Olana Partnership, in collaboration with Basilica Hudson, Hudson Hall, Partners for Climate Action, and Upstate Films, is proud to present a special screening of the 2021 film Meltdown at 4:00pm on Saturday, March 4 at Hudson Hall. The screening will be followed by a special Q&A with trailblazing Hudson-based photographer Lynn Davis and climate scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D.
Meltdown (Fredric Golding, 60 min., 2021) is a timely documentary that merges art and science as it follows acclaimed photographer Lynn Davis and climate scientist Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D. to the town of Illulisat, Greenland, considered the “Ground Zero” of climate change.
Coinciding with this special screening, two of Davis’s large-scale photographs from her travels to Greenland are on view at Olana State Historic Site as part of Olana’s first winter exhibition, Chasing Icebergs: Art and a Disappearing Landscape.Chasing Icebergs, which runs through March 26, traces the 19th century artist Frederic Church’s quest to paint icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Much like Church, Davis’ art is connected to global exploration, and she draws inspiration from remote locations, including the sublime beauty of the arctic landscape.
“I came searching for beauty, feeling loss, and now I’ve come to see the loss of the planet”, says Lynn Davis. “There’s all the statistics, the dangers, then there’s the awesome beauty.”
“How do you experience beauty at the same time that you have a sense of tragedy?” Anthony Leiserowitz asks. “It’s about life itself, isn’t it?”
“I’m so pleased we are presenting this timely film in Hudson,” said Carolyn Keogh, The Olana Partnership’s Director of Education & Public Programs. “Having Lynn’s work on view at Olana presents a wonderful occasion to revisit this important documentary’s discussion of our current climate crisis through the intersections of art and science.”
Lynn Davis is an internationally known photographer whose work has been exhibited worldwide and collected extensively. Davis received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1970 and apprenticed with Berenice Abbott in the summer of 1974. Since 1980, Davis has had over 86 solo shows and has work in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. She lives and works in Hudson, New York, near Olana, with her husband, the novelist and screenwriter Rudolph Wurlitzer. In April 2023, The Olana Partnership will present Lynn Davis with the Frederic Church Award.
Anthony Leiserowitz, Ph.D. is the founder and Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment. He is an expert on public climate change and environmental beliefs, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior, and the psychological, cultural, and political factors that shape them. He conducts research at the global, national, and local scales, including many surveys of the American public and is the host of Climate Connections, a radio program broadcast each day on more than 650 stations and frequencies nationwide.
Tickets cost $14 for General Admission and $10 for members of The Olana Partnership, Hudson Hall, Upstate Films, and Basilica Hudson. A special Q&A with Lynn Davis and Anthony Leiserowitz will follow the film’s screening.
Tickets can be purchased online at https://hudsonhall.org/event/meltdown/