At PUNCH now.
  • At PUNCH now.
"Today, given that we can know just about anything, a cave is even more of a cave," Sam Anderson wrote in an essay (in Sunday's NYT Mag) about Werner Herzog's new movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Bin Laden's Tora Bora as a "negative image of Manhattan," and the fact that Google has mapped just about every wet and dry part of earth—except caves.

Another wall.
  • Another wall.
PUNCH Gallery is like a cave this month. Paintings of a glacier scale the great walls, all the way to the cracked and peeling ceiling inside this old building inside this wet city. There are 80-some paintings. Every one depicts the same place—a glacier formation in Alaska—differently. The paintings are in watercolor and ink, and taken together, they give the impression that these walls are like cave walls: slimy, oozing, patterned, alive.

Camlin, a professor of painting at Western Washington University, has never visited this glacier. Yet she's spent hundreds of hours running her hands over its maps, creating crystalline formations for it, or the appearance instead of free-flowing water along its surfaces. Each painting is a slow build on the last, implying a glacial passage of time and an artistic process that combines painstaking repetition with novelty and invention. A looped video plays, of the paintings seen in oozing sequence. You climb down into all this information, slow down, and embrace how little you know despite how much you see.