Speaking the Infinite: From the Cold Edge Celebrates Beauty and Terror

  Felicia LeRoy, Stranded Ice, 2024, Kiln Cast & Carved Glass, Photo Print, Installation 23” x 23”, Individual pieces: Large 8” x 7”x 6” Small 7” x 7” x 5”

By EMMA RIVA October 28, 2024

Imagine the most vibrant, beautiful sunset you can. Better than any Instagram photo. Better than any professional photo—and it’s right in front of your eyes. Now imagine a group of people with their middle fingers up to it. This is what Candace Jensen and her cohort of the 2022 Arctic Circle Residency found themselves doing in Svalbard: Flipping off the sunset as the sublime colors of the Arctic bled into each other over the horizon. “We were so overwhelmed by the beauty that we were like ‘no more!’” Jensen explained. This idea of the overwhelming sublime shows up as a through-line in From the Cold Edge at Amos Eno Gallery, curated by Jensen, Jacinda Russell, and Hester Blum. The expedition was one of four in the calendar year 2022- theirs was the ‘October 2022 Autumn Expedition I’.

Everyone from the ancient Greek philosophers to contemporary authors and artists like Cal Flyn (who explored emptiness in the nonfiction collection Islands of Abandonment) and Nell Stevens (whose memoir Bleaker House shows the ultimate futility in seeking to write the perfect novel in isolation in the Falkland Islands) have been drawn to remote places as a source for inspiration. But that often fails to take into account what actually happens there. Jensen applied to the Arctic Circle Residency initially out of a desire to see the Northern Lights and incorporate her art practice into it. “I had this idea that I was going to do calligraphy under the lights,” she said. “All of us came with this idea of what we were going to find, and then it was different.”

Joan Albaugh, Lets Make a Deal, 2023, Oil on canvas, 40” x 40”

Blum, her fellow curator, is an academic who focuses on the literature of exploration in the Polar North. The residency was her first time at an artist residency, being around creatives rather than scholars. After completing the residency in 2022, Blum was invited to curate an issue of Regeneration, an environmental studies journal, which she and Jensen worked on together with Jacinda Russell. Then, Jensen had a slot open at Amos Eno Gallery, where members can curate shows throughout the year. Blum, Jensen and Russell extended their collaboration on the special issue of Regeneration to curate From the Cold Edge.

“One of the interesting things about Svalbard is that it never had an indigenous human population,” Blum explained. “The islands had been initially visited by Dutch, Russian, and Danish whalers and hunters, and later by Americans and Norwegians. It was essentially a mining colony, so the stakes of being an outsider there are different than in other parts of the circumpolar north, which have long Indigenous human histories. We saw a lot of infrastructural remains, which in Svalbard is considered cultural heritage.”

They wanted to incorporate and honor those roots in Svalbard, so From the Cold Edge included three of their Arctic guides, who are also artists, in the show. One of those, Sarah Gerats, specializes in a series of nude photographs in the Arctic landscape, which she was doing while working as a guide, sneaking off to the side to take them with another guide to protect her from polar bears while she removed her clothes to pose. These images are striking, the smallness of the human naked body, but also the majesty and sensuality that comes through from the Polar light. Gerats holds a degree in Time and Space—a remarkable thing to be a master of, but that use of duration and sense of space comes through in her photographs. There’s something haunting about them that merges the human body with the sublimity untouched by human hands. They appear to freeze time in the frozen landscape around them.

Candace Jensen, Svalbard Broadside: Terhi Nieminen “A Defeat is Better Than Nothing At All,” 4 color risograph on French paper cardstock, 11x17, Edition of 10

Another series that freezes time is Jacinda Russell’s collaborative work with poet Hannah Larrabee. Russell froze poems and photographs in ice, allowed them to melt, and took her own photographs in response to Larrabee’s poetry. Text fragments like I took a Polaroid of the low Arctic sun and it burned a hole in my film and all the things and all the things we couldn’t touch, all the places we shouldn’t step take text beyond its role as information-sharing language to an experiential part of the artwork. An exhibition about an experience that words fail to capture cannot be held in a single medium. This was one of Jensen’s core values for the show—she didn’t want her colleagues in sound, video, or poetry to be left out of it, so all of those mediums are given equal weight to the visual.

Jacinda Russell, the mountains here forgot us willingly, 2024, Archival Pigment Print, Photograph: 22” x 17”, Edition of 10

Hannah Larrabee, Walruses at Smeerenberg, 2022, Archival Pigment Print, Poem: 17” x 11” Poem broadside accompanies each photograph

But From the Cold Edge doesn’t veer entirely into abstraction and installation, its catalogue still remains grounded in the landscape of Svalbard. Greg Lecker’s plein air paintings, the only ones produced on the ship the residency cohort traveled on, allow a more literal view of Svalbard. “He’s treating the human vantage point as something worth making,” Jensen said. “These plein air paintings are sensual in terms of the senses.” Lecker painted during a long-duration moonrise, again calling back to the way the work in this show deals with the sense of time. Particularly resonant are his paintings of the antique ship’s rigging, the intricacies of how an object not created as a work of art is nonetheless full of artisanship and beauty.

   Greg Lecker, Moon Rigging, 2022-23, 9x12", Oil on board

Blum spoke of being “whelmed” by the landscape, in the passive voice, a term I had only heard in this scene from 10 Things I Hate About You where Gabrielle Union asks if you can ever just be “whelmed” instead of over or under-whelmed, and Larisa Oleynik responds “I think you can in Europe.” Since Svalbard is a Norwegian territory, she was technically right. But to be “whelmed” means to be submerged, engulfed, or overturned like a vessel, and Blum referenced this feeling in a moment from Moby Dick when Ishmael feels that “His finite self remains, but the infinity of his soul is drowned. The infinite that we receive can’t be spoken.”

Often, we speak of the failure of art to “capture” an experience. From the Cold Edge puts forth the possibility that artwork perhaps cannot “capture” certain things, because we cannot hold them in our hands or solidify them, like the light that filters through Zoriça Malkovich’s silk habotai prints, never quite the same twice. Rather than forcing work to capture what can’t be captured, From the Cold Edge allows Svalbard, instead, to captivate us. In that, the exhibition finds freedom.

From the Cold Edge is open through November 3 at Amos Eno Gallery and features Joan Albaugh , Leonor Anthony, Ashlin Aronin with Morgan Rosskopf, Hester Blum, Sergei Chernikov, Dianne Chisholm, Harley Cowan, Jessica Creane, Sarah Gerats, Laurie Glover, Brian House, Candace Jensen, Hannah Larrabee, Greg Lecker, Andrea Legge, Felicia LeRoy, Jia-Jen Lin, Alexandra Lockhart, Zoriça Kelly Markovich Alejandro Marra Mejía, Terhi Nieminen, Jacinda Russell, and Paula Sćiuk.

Closing Reception & Arctic Poetry Reading: Sunday, November 3rd, 4-6 p.m. Amos Eno Gallery, 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NYWM