The Canary Project and Jon Santos' Dimensions of Change  presented by InLiquid.com   September 4 - 22, 2006 Crane Arts Building 1400 N. American Street, Philadelphia Opening reception: September 15, 5:30 - 8 pm   Dimensions of Change is a collaboration between New York artist Jon Santos and The Canary Project, which is compiling a persuasive visual record of climate change and its potential for devastation.  The Canary Project's director and photographer, Susannah Sayler, captures images of landscapes throughout the world that are undergoing dramatic transformation or are vulnerable to predicted changes to come.  She then works with scientists, writers, and other artists to show these images in ways that will speak to a wide variety of people.   Jon Santos is interested in the shortcomings of 20th century utopian design ideals and our nostalgic appreciation of a vision that was never fulfilled.  This unrealized promise becomes unsettling as we push forward into the future and the design ideals of the past come to seem like science fiction.  Santos' seemingly abstract line compositions are actually re-workings of the geodesic dome structures favored by utopian designers such as Buckminster Fuller.  These compositions suggest a sense of beauty in collapse.    For Santos, our inability to implement the sustainable technology necessary to slow global warming is connected to the failure of last century's utopian design ideals.  In this ongoing collaboration, artist Jon Santos creates graphic collages with Canary Project photos and develops other conceptual approaches that extend the project's themes into other media, like video and sculpture. The focus of this collaboration is on the various modes of transformation that the planet earth is undergoing.  Santos combines graphic elements that consist of simple geometric shapes, color fields, and abstract line work.   The debut of this collaboration will be an installation at The Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American Street, Philadelphia, that will run from September 4 through 22, with a reception and special event on the night of Friday, September 15.  For this exhibition, Santos and The Canary Project will freeze a geodesic-inspired sculpture in a block of ice and allow it to melt until the sculpture too begins to fall apart and disintegrate.  This process will be documented with time-lapse photography. Santos will also present a projected animation that will focus on water in its various physical states with relation to bleached corals in Belize and melting glaciers in Austria.   Santos' work with The Canary Project will be linked to a billboard posted in Philadelphia later this fall and a line of T-shirts designed exclusively for Loomstate, a 100% organic cotton label dedicated to sustainability.