Within the White Cube of the gallery-here posited as a substitute for the minimalist landscape of the Arctic Sublime-the exhibition takes as its starting point Mercator’s imaginative speculation of dual magnetic north poles from 1569 and ends with recent geomatic renderings by an indigenous government. ISBN 978-2-920384-84 From afar, the shifting phenomenon of magnetic north provides guidance not unlike Polaris, but as one draws close to the shadowy realm of the Arctic, navigation and communication begins to go awry, forcing the nomad to experiment within a no man’s land Military & religious colonisation, hazardous testing, and a disregard for a fragile ecosystem mark the past of the Arctic, but so do inventive and sensitive projects. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.Įxhibition Catalogue for show curated by Charles Stankievech at Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University. O'Dochartaigh's investigation into the nature of the on-board visual culture of the nineteenth-century Arctic presents a compelling challenge to the 'man-versus-nature' trope that still reverberates in polar imaginaries today. Although the metropolitan Arctic revolved around a fulcrum of heroism, terror and the sublime, the visual culture of the ship reveals a more complicated narrative that included cross-dressing, theatricals, dressmaking, and dances with local communities. Eavan O'Dochartaigh closely examines neglected archival sources to show how pictures created in the Arctic fed into a metropolitan view transmitted through engravings, lithographs, and panoramas. The array of visual and textual material produced on these voyages was to have a profound impact on the idea of the Arctic in the Victorian imaginary. In the mid-nineteenth century, thirty-six expeditions set out for the Northwest Passage in search of Sir John Franklin's missing expedition. “The Global Politics of Color in the Arctic Landscape: Blackness at the Center of Frederic Edwin Church’s Aurora Borealis (1865) and Nineteenth-Century Limits of Representation” ARTMargins. The article furthermore draws connections to the nineteenth-century trade in pigments, the interconnected routes of slavery, and cultural modes of urban modernity. The article connects Aurora Borealis to emerging lens technologies-especially photography and astronomy, and later the cinema and composite satellite imagery, to argue for circumpolar north as globally connected-then, and now. This article discusses how the impressive palette of Aurora Borealis and its black semi-circle in the center allow for a revisionist understanding of Church's contributions to a rich history of Arctic representation, including in an age of climate change and rapidly melting ice. American painter Frederic Edwin Church's monumental oil painting Aurora Borealis (1865) presents a stark contrast to the dominant Western tradition of representing the Arctic as monochrome and static.
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