UD students will be able to get a former student's view of Antarctica thanks to an exhibition in ArtStreet Studio D through Oct. 11.

Chris Kannen, a Cleveland native, graduated from UD in 1999 with a degree in Visual Communication Design. This year, he received a grant from the National Science Foundation Artists and Writers Program to go to Antarctica from February to April.

"I was interested in its remoteness and that it's a cutting edge location for science research," Kannen said on the phone Wednesday. "Most importantly it has a landscape, and I'm someone that makes artwork based on landscape. It's also a really unusual, fascinating and little-known landscape and environment that I wanted to see with my own eyes."

According to his blog about the experience, www.chriskannen.net/blog, he went there to "accompany researchers in the McMurdo Dry Valleys as they gain new perspectives on how the small life of this extreme environment thrives despite the four-month disappearance of the sun."

Kannen accompanied the researchers to gather visual and psychological expressions for a new collection of artwork.

"The exhibit at ArtStreet gives us the chance to see a painter's first, fresh response to an amazing landscape that few people will ever experience," Susan Byrnes, director of ArtStreet, said. "While Chris's painting style is abstract and at times the brushstrokes are more emphasized than the landscape image they represent, you can still clearly see references to huge mountains and vast skies."

The pieces on exhibit at ArtStreet are some small sketches and paintings he made in a tiny studio in Antarctica. The size of his artwork, however, contrast with the vast size of the landscape they depict.

"The landscapes I made before I left were large, 8-by-10 foot paintings," Kannen said. "When I got there I was limited by the spaces I could work in and the amount of the materials I could bring, so I had to work small. After being there I realized a lot of the beauty of that place is in the details."

Kannen said the vastness was difficult to contain in one artwork, and he's glad the limitations required him to work on a smaller scale.

The grant he received allowed him to photograph, film, and draw what he saw on the continent, and in the next year or two he will make a longer series of paintings based on some very specific features he saw in Antarctica.

"I recognize that the work is pretty abstract and people may not connect with it in a real immediate way, because it's not a picture of an identifiable thing," Kannen said. "I hope it will make someone more curious both about contemporary artwork and the landscape of Antarctica. If someone takes an interest in what I made or what I saw, they may learn more about that part of the world."