Coral reefs the world over are dying out at a rate faster than rainforests. In addition to global warming and pollutants, marine life is threatened by a tsunami of plastic that is flooding into our oceans. The handmade reefs on display here are a wooly testimony to the disappearing wonder of actual reefs that now engages women around the globe. The project also celebrates the strange hyperbolic geometry of the ocean realm, which is reflected in the crochet techniques.

This unique work consists of a collossal reef created by hundreds of artists from New York and another by artists from Chicago. The assembled work is continually growing and evolving since it moved to SHOW from the World Financial Center in Manhattan. Each of the hundreds of pieces is a work of beauty in itself created by a different artist. Their placement in this particular reef formation creates a spectacular riot of form and color that can be appreciated in awe from a distance, or approached to reveal more and different forms from a more microscopic view.

SHOW'S windows contain the Chicago Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, all by Chicago area artists, and the mind-boggling seascape of yarn and plastic inside is the New York Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, among whose 100+ creators are over 30 Staten Islanders. Unlike the dwindling coral reefs under the seas, the source of our food chain, the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is constantly growing. In displaying it we hope, as the artists did in creating it, to bring attention to the fact that as with all that strikes us in nature, its physical beauty is a call to its protection.

2008 is the International Year of the Reef.

Created by Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, with hundreds of contributing artists.
Presented in association with the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Steinhardt School at NYU.

www.theiff.org

Possibly the most expensive pictures ever created, and the most mind-expanding. Michael Benson has taken photographs of planets, their moons and other parts of our solar system shot by robots on spacecraft over an area of 3 billion miles, and created clear and spectacular images of vistas never seen by human eyes. Through complex digital manipulation, and in some cases, creation of mosaics from many smaller images, he shows us the fascinating corners of "space" that people have dreamed of seeing since they could look up. They turn out to be more spectacular than we could have imagined.

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corners found and portrayed by d’Eglise are not discernible as France, or even Earth. Patterns of nature, in all their fascinating complexity and simplicity, are visible here on the land to anyone who will visit Normandie, or explore their backyard, and the resulting photographs look as exotic as if d'Eglise were, as he imagines, the first person ever to see them. The natural patterns under the seas of Earth's surviving coral reefs, are seen by those with the luxury of scuba diving in faraway seas, and are imagined in the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, and, as seen in Michael Benson’s images made with the help of a robot's eye, in many ways as “exotic” as scapes of other planets and in space.