Ice Park

Noriko Furunishi’s first gallery show in New York offers a perfectly pleasant addition to the growing genre of large, digitally manipulated photographs in which vast, often gorgeous landscapes become startlingly larger, and more gorgeous, after you spot the tiny figures of people in them. In Ms. Furunishi’s work the jump in scale is especially extreme: what at first appear to be close-ups of icicles on a frozen stream are actually images of cascades of frozen water several stories high. They are man-made, created in a park in Colorado for the increasingly popular sport of ice climbing.

This becomes more clear when you spot the nearly infinitesimal silhouettes of athletes climbing the sheer, crystalline waterfalls of ice. It may take a little longer before you realize that the scenes are often doubled, with bluffs and fringes of trees at the top and the bottom of the image. The most interesting thing about them is their resemblance to Chinese landscape painting.