Industry News
Lift passes in Aspen Snowmass, Colorado, will this year feature artwork by Swiss artist Claudia Comte. Every year the Aspen Ski Company showcases the artwork of a different artist on their lift tickets and season passes. For the 23/24 season, world-renowned Swiss multi-medium artist Claudia Comte’s work was chosen as part of the Art in Unexpected Places project by the resort. As part of the project, Comte’s work will also be featured in on-mountain installations, in hotels and restaurants, at special events, as well as through collaborative merchandising.
Claudia Comte was born in Grancy in the French speaking canton of Vaud in Switzerland. She studied Visual Arts in nearby Lausanne and also holds a Masters in Education. The 40-year-old artist resides in Basel, the Swiss center of the arts and home to international fair ‘Art Basel’. Comte works in installation, painting, engraving, murals, and sculpture. Her wood pieces depicting cactuses, for example, were created using her chainsaw.
The 2023/24 collaboration with Comte consists of five of her recent works, each offering a unique perspective on how we view the environment and climate crisis. Some are more subtle, like “Underwater Sculpture Park, Jamaica,” which depicts cactus sculptures on an ocean floor, or “10 Rooms, 40 Walls, 1059 m2,” showing a beautifully hand-crafted wooden cactus sculpture in a studio setting with a drawn fence, moon, and sun on the wall behind it.
Then, there are the bolder messages, like a diminishing iceberg floating in the ocean, cramped livestock, a trash-covered beach—all muted images with overlaid cartoon lettering reading “HaHaHaHa.” The cheeky caricature lettering combined with the natural settings offers a lightness juxtaposed to the topic being tackled: catastrophe. Are we able to enjoy the world while we are destroying it? Can we exist within these dualities? Deploying works that combine objects from the natural world with digital forms, Comte demonstrates the transformative capacity of the ecological world and challenges us to explore these questions.
“Through the ski passes, I weave art’s tapestry into the very fabric of mountain adventure, where nature’s serenity dances with the exhilaration of skiing. In the playful embrace of cacti amid snow-kissed slopes, I beckon you to explore the unexpected.”
— Claudia Comte
Fighting climate change has been a central mission of Aspen Snowmass’ sustainability efforts for more than two decades. “The vast majority of rational people understand that climate change is real, that it is driven by fossil-fuel emissions, and that we need to do something about it,” says Michael Miracle, Aspen Skiing Company’s director of community engagement. “But it’s that ‘doing something about it’ piece that we continue to struggle with as a society. Claudia’s art can help shake people out of their complacency. Her ‘An Impending Disaster (HaHaHa)’ series strikes me as a particularly on-tone reminder. Only a maniacally cackling lunatic could think climate change anything but deadly serious at this point.”
Aspen Skiing Company and the Aspen Art Museum started the ‘Art in Unexpected Places’ initiative in 2005. The artwork on its lift passes is one of the cornerstones of this initiative. Since then, 19 different artists have been chosen for the design of the resort’s ski passes. Past artists showcased on the Aspen Snowmass ski passes include Takashi Murakami, FriendsWithYou, Hank Willis Thomas, and David Shrigley. It is an innovative way of engaging guests with art and Comte’s message around climate change will hopefully be thought provoking and raise awareness around sustainability.
The exhibit of Claudia Comte’s work at Aspen Snowmass will run through September 2024.
