ABOUT

What is a FRIZION?

The Artist

Dr. Peter Wasilewski

As a NASA scientist, Dr. Peter Wasilewski used to play with rocks. He researched the magnetic properties of meteroites, Moon rocks and Earth rocks. His passion for scientific quests led him to turn down a tryout for the Baltimore Colts professional football team so that he could participate in an exploration to the world’s largest piece of ice – Antarctica.

Peter fell in love with the frozen continent and has been back on 6 different expeditions over 25 years. During an early exploration near the base of the Antarctic Peninsula Peter trod where no human had set foot before and there stands an ancient volcano that bears his name – Mount Wasilewski.

Later expeditions found him collecting meteorites on the pale blue ice near the Trans-Antarctic mountains. He sampled this ice and learned about the “color” and shape of the ice crystals that could be seen in thin sections of the ice. Now Dr. Peter plays with ice – painting with light on a canvas of ice.

The Medium

Frozen Water

Water, as ice, is one of the most widespread, intriguing and familiar compounds on the planet, in the solar system and beyond. On this planet it falls as snow, forms lacy deposits on winter windows, creates skating surfaces on lakes, gracefully drapes rock cliffs, packs thickly on the polar oceans and lays even thicker on the ice caps blanketing Greenland and Antarctica.

Beyond the planet Earth, Ice is present in the frozen oeans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, in the particles of Saturn’s rings and in the spectacular tails of passing comets. Beyond the Solar System, many light years beyond the Earth, ice is present in the dense molecular clouds of the regions where new stars form.

The Artform

FRIZIONs = Frozen Visions

How does a FRIZION become? Thin layers of water are frozen, manipulated and exposed to polarized light. Light has wave-like properties – one of which is vibration. Ordinary white light vibrates in many directions, but a polarizing filter blocks all light except that which is vibrating in a single direction. A polarizing filter is placed on a light table to polarize the light passing through. A petri dish with a thin layer of water in the process of freezing is placed over the filter. As the polarized light passes through the forming ice crystals, it is bent in two slightly different directions and forms two distinct rays of light. The color palette in the images is created by rotating a second polarizing filter placed over the ice to intercept and resolve these emerging light rays.

Dr. Peter learned to control the way the ice grew, using color as his guide. Ice growth and thickness became the landscape while the polarizer sheet morphed into the painting palette. A wide array of imagery burst out of the ice – from simple bold formations to intricate patterns that encompassed both the familiar and the alien…