Arctic Crisis Photomontage Series

Arctic Crisis – Ecology of Narrative Spaces – 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 (Hawk ins). 

In this Part 1 series, it is geo politically contrasting street images of central arctic communities and New York City that are digitally layered as transparencies, as compared to in Part 2 where arctic images are layered with my journal notes.

My 1980-82 arctic film photographs are reinvented using contemporary digital editing technologies available in 2006-09 within a contemporary discussion on global climate change impacts. By optimally layering, a space is created where viewer in-and-out perceiving action is engaged. This creates a space for individual interpretation of interconnections of the whole, and places the viewer as subject with the work.

Despite their contrasting geo-political-cultural locations, they are each vulnerable to the impacts of global warming causing melting permafrost in the Arctic and flooding of the Atlantic coastal elevation of New York City. 

“Crisis” in the title of this Part 1 series implies a turning point. Inuit peoples of the circumpolar countries recognize their commonality regarding the threat to their way of life. Shoreline markers for navigating direction and identities are disappearing.

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.