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Arctic Crisis Project: Part 1

#02 Holman Isl. Dogs and NYC International Clocks

#05 Holman Skating and Time Square Traffic Pylons, NYC

#03 Coppermine Can and Madison Ave. NYC

#13 Spence Bay, Council Offic and United Nations, NYC

#17 Cambridge Bay Housing & Time Square Yahoo Sign, NYC

Arctic Crisis Project: Part 1 is a series of fifteen photomontage prints that engages a contemporary aesthetic and socio environmental discussion on the simultaneity of global forces and intimate spaces; identity, the weaving of memory (Walter Benjamin), reflexive consciousness (Brecht), and ecology of narrative space (Hawkins).

In Part 1, layered photographic elements derive from personal experiences while visiting Central Arctic communities in Canada during January/February 1981, and while visiting New York City during the past ten years, a recognized world power now vulnerable to flooding by rapidly melting Arctic ice.

The individual photomontage titles each reference a specific Central Arctic geo political location. However, my use of “Arctic” in the overall project title relates more to the idea of a circumpolar region where geo political boundaries are transcended by global forces. The Inuit people of the circumpolar region also recognize their commonality regarding their threatened natural environment. “Crisis” in the title is the operative word relating to contemporary shifts in global human-environmental identity affected by global warming. The optimal layering of images, where viewer in-and-out perceiving action is engaged, creates space for individual interpretation of interconnections of the whole, placing the viewer as subject with the work.

In Part 1, as narrator of my filtered and integrated memories, meaning is reinvented from a contemporary standpoint and perception. In this way memories weave together, as Benjamin Walter would say, to become an investigation of the simultaneity of past, present and future aspirations and foreboding. Visual poetics of winter Arctic twilight and composition reinforce the sense of the collapse of space and time and to an identity that transcends geo political boundaries as being an integrated whole.