‘GALVESTON AND TEXAS CITY, 2517’ DEBUTED WITH A 3,000-POUND BLOCK OF ICE ON TOP.

The piece: “Galveston and Texas City, Year 2517” The artist: Erik Hagen Where: Art Alley, Silos at Sawyer Yards, 1500 Sawyer Why: We know sea-level rise is as inevitable as future rainbased flooding, right? Erik Hagen’s installation visualizes what that might mean for the Texas Gulf Coast in 500 years. Even if you can’t quite figure out the topographic rendering at its base — which Hagen compiled by layering about 30 maps in Photoshop — the watery surface supplies the basic idea: At some point, your descendents will need more than snorkels to live in Galveston and Texas City. The rate at which civilization slows or halts carbon dioxide emissions — a big unknown — will determine how far down the line those descendents will be. This isn’t just pie-in-the-sky art talk. Hagen based his piece on information from Curt Stager’s 2011 book “Deep Future,” a survey of mainstream climate science. The maps he layered to illustrate future sea-level rises of various depths are sourced from government agencies. A legend in one corner identifies scenarios based on depths of 5-10 feet below sea level to more than 40 feet above. But that’s not quite as dramatic as the opening “performance” Hagen staged by placing 3,000 pounds of ice (formed with 60 fused blocks of 50 pounds each) and allowing viewers to touch and play with it. Hagen estimated the ice would last 10 days after a Saturday debut, but by mid-morning Tuesday, all that remained was an iceberg-shaped fragment about a foot high and long. Hagen blamed high humidity and wind. Still, he was thrilled with the process of the melt: Not just the metaphor but the dripping and crackling sounds of ice returning to water and the sculptural shapes that evolved, “evoking loss, but hinting at the power of transformation.” Within the shallow pool center of Hagen’s tablelike structure of pressure-treated wood, resin and recessed, solar-powered LED lights, an organic, constantly shifting “sea bottom” has formed from granules of clay that blew over from Trey Duvall’s nearby “Traverse: Stack/Void” installation of unfired porcelain slabs. Growing up in Minnesota, Hagen loved watching ice disappear each spring. “The melting snowbanks facing the sun would reveal a crystalline lacelike latticework suspended centimeters above the snow,” he says. “During late afternoons, the meltwater would carve tiny caverns through rotten ice, and you could see sparkles as drops opened new paths to the earth.” Funded through an Individual Artist Grant from the city of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance, Hagen’s installation will remain up for a year and be duplicated this winter at Rice University. The ice may be gone, but he expects the water to ebb and flow continuously. “We get 36 inches of rain a year,” he said. He hasn’t planned for a drought.