Saturday in Temecula...

After putting a lot of miles on the Subaru lately, it was nice to just stay in town and explore with Lori.

We met at the Farmers Market where the main activity was foliage fondling!

We were most impressed with the Banksia, a genus of around 170 species in the plant family Proteaceae. These Australian wildflowers, and popular garden plants, are easily recognized by their characteristic flower spikes, and woody fruiting "cones" and heads. They range in size from prostrate woody shrubs to trees up to 100 ft tall. We were told they could stay in a vase for up to three weeks and then one would dry them. Wow.

After lunch at our favorite spot, Rosa's Café, we headed to the Temecula Valley Museum for Walking in Antarctica.

"This immersive, interdisciplinary project brings together photography, sculpture, and audio narrative, taking the viewer on a journey through an extraordinary environment that few people ever visit — over frozen lakes, around towering glaciers and baroque sea ice formations, into a magnificent frozen ice cave, across fields of surreal boulders, and through a penguin colony."

In 2015, artist Helen Glazer traveled to Antarctica as a grantee of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, in order to photograph ice and geological formations for eventual production as photographic prints and sculptures. She worked out of remote Antarctic scientific field camps and had access to protected areas that can only be entered with government permits or in the company of a skilled mountaineer.

It was an added layer when we logged on to the audio tour (link here with photos) that combines personal narrative with sound effects to add an immersive multimedia component to the experience of viewing the art. The audio clips recount the journeys to these places, interactions with scientists and support personnel, vignettes of field camp life, sensory impressions, and technical information about the process of making the sculptures. What a unique exhibit.