Art for a snowy day

http://www.martin-munoz.com/

On this beautiful snowy day in Boston, here's some appropriate art to ponder as I look out my window at the white blanket covering the city.

Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz make tiny, three-dimensional works of art and put them inside snow globes. Their current show, "Islands," is on view at P.P.O.W. in Chelsea through February 9th. Snow globes are typically purchased as travel souvenirs, or are sentimentalized display pieces of peaceful, comforting rural scenes. But the scenes Martin and Muñoz put in their snow globes are, well, kind of disturbing. They're like snow globes in a nightmare world. The landscapes are barren, sparse, colorless, and punctuated with forlorn-looking human figures isolated in the harsh elements. Cold and macabre, but also weirdly compelling. The Cliff (2006), above, especially intrigued me. The spectacle of people jumping off a cliff to their deaths like that, en masse, reminds me of the people jumping from the towers on 9/11.