Meredith Leich

The short film “Scaling Quelccaya” (2017, 7:30) grew out of a multi-year collaboration with glaciologist Dr. Andrew Malone, weaving together two distant places: the melting Quelccaya glacier in Peru and the city of Chicago. As the world’s largest tropical glacier, Quelccaya and its rapid retreat is studied by scientists around the world as significant evidence of rising global temperatures. Using 3D animation generated from satellite imagery of the glacier, we created a series of videos to explore an altered world, in which Chicago serves as a surreal measuring stick through which we can envision the glacier’s changing form and our changing world.

The project has generated a short “docufantsy” film (debuted at the Athens International Film and Video Festival in 2018), as well as single and two channel video installations. We have given talks, presented the project at the 2017 American Geologists’ Union Conference in New Orleans, and been the subject of a mini documentary created by the University of Chicago. You can read more about the technical procedure behind the process here.

This project was supported by the 2015-16 Arts, Science & Culture Initiative Graduate Collaboration Grants from the University of Chicago and funded by the Graduate Division, School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a 2018 Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Project Grant.

Screenings and Exhibitions:
Deutsche Bank Macht Kunst Contest – Second Prize (2017)
Quartier Zukunft, Berlin (2017)
Ann Arbor Film Festival, Ann Arbor, MI (2019)
Chicagoland Shorts Volume 5, Chicago, IL (2019)
Athens International Film and Video Festival, Athens, OH (2018)
Altered Aesthetics Film Festival, Minneapolis, MN (2018)
Great Lakes International Film Festival, Eerie, PA (2018)
Altered States, Lexington Art League (2018)
Arts Club of Chicago Drawing Room, Chicago, IL (2018)