Time & Location

Mar 14, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Big Picture Theater & Cafe, 48 Carroll Rd, Waitsfield, VT 05673, USA

MAD ARTS, with art show Zero Celsius, brings you Reynolds’ art video, The Word for Weather is Knowledge. The screening will be followed by a lively exchange, ranging from the special place of Greenland today to art and environmental awareness, celebrating McKibben’s recent book, Here Comes the Sun.
Short synopsis
The Word for Weather is Knowledge is a single channel video installation by Los Angeles based
artist Rob Reynolds, filmed in Arctic Greenland during the summer of 2019, the warmest period
in recorded history (to that date). The project began as a restaging of a tense sequence in
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now during peak melt in the Arctic circle.
Filming in high-definition video as a platform for close looking, the project was shot entirely in
midnight sun from a small open boat in close proximity to giant icebergs, tracing the constantly
changing contours of the Jakobshavn Icefjord, one of the greatest contributors to sea level rise
on earth. While billions of gallons of meltwater flow into the ocean from the Greenland ice
sheet, an improvised voiceover by a local boat driver in Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) dialect offers a
first-person, personal perspective on recent ecological changes transforming the Arctic,
revealing that the Inuktitut word for weather, for knowledge and even spirit are one in the
same: sila. With musical soundscape by composer Craig Wedren.