The Arctic universe, our former virgin land both
inhospitable and wild, has turned into the Eldorado of
the future. This work traces a region to its downfall,
attempting to draw us closer to the essence of image
capture, memorialisation, and our nostalgic yearning for
the immediate past. Here is a landscape so grandiose that
attempting to frame it into a single image seems perpetually
inadequate.
These hyper-real photographs almost defy reality,
alluding to our sense of the real and virtual, and our
obsession with looking to other planets — while neglecting
what we have here on earth. Our idyllic vision of the far
North will soon be gone, as changes to our environment
bring both opportunity, and equally, the opposing value of
loss. Photography, despite having a fraught relationship with
truth from its inception, still possesses a certain ability to
command visibility amongst even the ignorant, especially
in processing and comprehending loss - as is arguably its
essence.
Transformation and loss are the basis of this work, built
on the multitude of layers accumulated over centuries and
millennia, as little by little they are reduced to nothing. In this
series, past and future are conflated in the same image —
the absence of ice, as much as the presence of thick glacial
layers stubbornly resisting death. Photographic negatives
are over and under exposed in a mimetic gesture of natural
forces transforming the Arctic, as rain replaces snow, and
the material becomes immaterial.
D.A. Kerr