Opening October 22 at Scandinavia House, On the Arctic Edge — Artists Explore the Far North presents three contemporary photo-based artists whose work traverses the regions of the Arctic Circle to probe themes ranging from time and memory, to landscape and the built environment, to science and mythology, to our changing climate. On view through January 28, 2023, the exhibition will be accompanied by a range of programming, including art workshops for all ages.
Photographer and interdisciplinary artist Clare Benson’s series Until There Is No Sun is a poetic investigation of the Arctic’s duality: the relationships between light and seeing, earth and sky, science and ancient myth. Created over nearly a year living in the far north of Arctic Sweden working in coordination with space physicists, Sami indigenous reindeer herders, and scientists studying the eyes of Arctic reindeer, her photographs, videos, and collected artifacts on view include the time-lapse capture video work A Thousand Suns, made with an All-Sky Camera at the Swedish Institute for Space Physics (IRF) in Kiruna, and the series Seasonal Adaptations in the Eyes of Arctic Reindeer.
Marion Belanger photographs the cultural landscape, particularly where geology and the built environment intersect, exploring concepts of persistence and change and ways that boundaries demarcate differences. Her series Rift/Fault studies shifting land-based tectonic edges of the North American Continental Plate in Iceland and California, examining their unpredictable and uncontainable behavior. Published in the 2017 monograph Rift/Fault (Radius Books), author and art critic Lucy Lippard writes that Belanger “comments on the visible and the invisible, acknowledgement and denial, examining, in the process, the ‘dangerous disconnect,’ where so-called ordinary lives play out in the shadows of potential cataclysm.”
NYC-based fine-art photographer Steve Giovinco’s lyrical night landscapes in the recent series Inertia look at the land, ice, and communities of Southern Greenland. Giovinco traveled to locations including Narsarsuaq, a small remote town lying in the shadow of glaciers, to capture vast scarred landscapes; shrinking icebergs and ice floes; desolate villages; and 400-year-old Norse ruins; all marked with minimal traces of human intervention. Photographed through the hours of changing light at dawn, twilight, or nighttime the vistas are haunted, luminous, magical and at times devastating.
Each artist is an ASF Fellow having received financial support from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, which since it began over a century ago has awarded over 5,500 fellowships and grants to Americans and Scandinavians. This exhibition is made possible due to the generosity of the Inger G. & William B. Ginsberg Support Fund, the Virginia Barron Tayloe Bequest, the Bonnier Family Fund for Contemporary Art, and the Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.
