Bridgette Mayer Gallery is pleased to present Stephen Antonson’s “Echoes From the Snowball Club” in the vault gallery, where his snowball chandelier will preside over the constellation paintings inspired by Ernest Shackleton’s storied expedition to Antarctica in 1918.
The failed attempt to reach the South Pole, exacerbated by his ship, The Endurance, being frozen in pack ice, forced Shackleton’s crew to spend months awaiting the Spring thaw. Antonson imagines them creating the Snowball Club to alleviate boredom. Among their most successful collaborations below deck was the TK Chandelier, created to illuminate the short winter days, when there was no sun above the horizon. Human in scale and with endless variations possible, it is an object at once prosaic and poetic. Navigator Frank Worsley, conjectures Antonson, conceived of the constellation paintings, basing them on actual star charts. His men made alterations to the paintings, then named the pieces after themselves.
In “Echoes from the Snowball Club”, Antonson creates works in plaster of Paris, a material for which he has been recognized as having mastered through his collections of furniture, lighting and accessories. His most recent suite of pieces, the critically acclaimed Shackleton Collection, are exhibited in showrooms in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and collected by some of the world’s top interior designers including Peter Marino, William Sofield, David Collins Studio, and Daniel Romauldez. Antonson has exhibited his drawings, photography and video installations in New York, Los Angeles and London. “Echoes From the Snowball Club” represents a unique intersection of his contemporary design and fine art practices.