Tony Rosati @ Cerulean Arts
1355 Ridge Ave.
Philadelphia
Dec. 12, 2024
There’s no snowman standing outside your window — yet.
But inside Cerulean Arts gallery, three snow-made men are already hanging on the walls. And they’re not happy with us.
They appear in a triptych of black and white prints, in which artist Tony Rosati shows us the menacing underbelly of snowman society.
Turns out Frosty was propaganda, a superficial television take that merely skimmed the surface of real existential dread. Maybe the kids who build snow creatures of their own image are jolly and happy souls, but the heart of the snowman is forever cold. Rosati reveals the frigid truth in a series of portraits displaying the sculptural species’ true nature.
In one scene, the scarf we so “lovingly” wrap around snowmen’s necks is portrayed as a snake, a live noose suffocating the snowman’s ice cold body. Another etching unveils some shocking behavior: the snowman cannibalizing his own kind, cutting into a smaller snowball — pick on someone your own size! — with a knife and fork.
A larger lithograph offers a dramatic but straight-on look at the plain facts of snowman existence: shrouded in darkness, the statue of snow remains frozen in place night after night, surrounded by the matter of his own existence. The moon above snowballs until the creature is subsumed by his own image, symbolizing what it means to live and die by human hands, to be born into consciousness by minds that can’t fathom your own reality only to be battered into puddles by an ever-advancing sun.
It’s a cruel irony that a smile — made out of coal nonetheless — is permanently affixed to the snowman’s face.
We could consider ourselves lucky to see so much as a flurry of flakes this winter. Childhood days of digging roads, mazes and men through anticipated blizzards of the stuff feel far gone. In Philadelphia and beyond, the snowman is quickly and quietly becoming an extinct species.
With all the shit going on in the world, I don’t spend so much time thinking about life, liberty or pursuit of happiness when it comes to the humble snowman. It’s more popular to talk about robotic rights and the future of sentient machinery. I say it's time to talk about the karmic consequences of fashioning joyless aliens in our own image only to watch them melt into nothing!
The snow may be disappearing from our sight, but the water cycle is churning and burping with the spirits of child glee gone wrong. Though our local winters seem to be shrinking shorter and shorter, increasingly volatile weather means we never know when sleet and snow could come pummeling down. I fear the ghosts of snowmen past are staging a comeback — and fantasizing about turning our solipsistic frowns deeper into the ground.
Tony Rosati's snowmen are on display at Cerulean Arts through Jan. 12. What comes after Jan. 12? Only time will tell.
