Telluride Arts HQ West
May 24, 2024– July 29, 2024
Telluride Arts Presents:
Liquid Mountains
By Jack Plantz
Jack Plantz is a local artist and designer, born and raised in Telluride. His work celebrates the immense complexity of the natural world while exploring the creative possibilities of modern technology. As a lifelong skier, climber, and kayaker he loves playing in the mountains, and finds endless inspiration adventuring amongst them.
With these works Jack wanted to experiment with digital tools to create artworks that capture the feeling of being in the presence of some of the world's most iconic peaks, while depicting them in a new and different light. The intensely saturated colors, intricate detail and sweeping lines attempt to convey the sense of scale one experiences when looking up at these summits. The sense of flowing liquid also hints at the dynamic and changing aspect of mountains. In our short lifetimes they appear to be permanent features, but over geologic timescales they are in constant motion, subject to persistent forces that act over millennia to create the forms we see today. It’s part of why I love being in the mountains, to feel like a tiny dot in a massive landscape, and a brief blip in unfolding eons of time.
To create this series, Jack sourced elevation data from LIDAR and satellite imagery to create accurate 3D models of each mountain or formation. These high resolution models were then rendered using physics based ray tracing methods to simulate the reflections and refractions that would occur if the terrain was made of a transparent medium like water or glass. The accurate detail in the geometry of the mountains melts into abstract color, resulting in surreal and vibrant images grounded in data measured from the actual locations.