Visual artist and alumna Christina Seely presents “Changing Time: an Artistic Inquiry into Climate Change”

October 7, 2014

In conjunction with the Carleton College art exhibit “Marking Time,” which addresses the impact of climate change through photography and other new media, featured artist Christina Seely ’98 will make a campus appearance to discuss her work and muse upon climate change from her perspective as an expeditionary artist. Seely will present “Changing Time: an Artistic Inquiry into Climate Change” on Tuesday, Oct. 14 from 7 to 9 p.m. in the Weitz Center for Creativity Cinema. This event is free and open to the public.

On display in the Braucher Gallery of the Perlman Teaching Museum, Seely’s “Markers of Time” uses evocative photos and videos, shot in the Arctic Circle and equatorial regions, to meditate on climate change and how time is measured and experienced. The multi-layered exhibit combines photographic media, texts, and video installations to consider our complex and ever-changing relationship to systems of the planet.  Media builds conversations with both science and art history; works address geologic time, man-made vs. natural time, and how climate change is altering seemingly fixed natural cycles. 

Seely’s uses photography and related media to stimulate conversations around the complex relationships between humankind and the natural world.  As the artist herself writes, “An experiential examination of our relationship to time and the natural world makes up the root of my artistic practice.  This practice has become focused on the art of bearing witness in the far reaches of the planet.” Current work, based on extensive travel in the arctic and the tropics, goes beyond simple documentation of climate change and weather to embody meditations on time in nature and culture.

A 1998 graduate of Carleton College, Seely is an assistant professor of studio art at Dartmouth College. She formerly taught photography and interdisciplinary arts at the California College of the Arts. Seely received an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and is the recipient of a 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

Seely is also a principal member of Civil Twilight, a design collective whose Lunar Resonant Streetlights (streetlights that dim and brighten in correlation with the moon phoases) won Metropolis Magazine’s 2007 “Next Generation Design Competition.” 

“Book Interventions,” an exhibition curated by Seely, juxtaposing books as embodiments of visual and scientific perspectives, can be found in the Carleton College Gould Library. For more about her work, visit www.christinaseely.com.

This event is sponsored by the Perlman Teaching Museum. “Marking Time,” featuring Christina Seely’s “Markers of Time” and Ken Tape’s “Then and Now: The Changing Arctic Landscape,” will be on display through November 19 in the Braucher Gallery and Kaemmer Family Gallery of the Perlman Teaching Museum, located in the Weitz Center for Creativity (320 Third Street in Northfield). Admission to the museum is free. Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday-Wednesday; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Thursday and Friday; and 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For more information, contact Laurel Bradley, director and curator of the Perlman Teaching Museum, at (507) 222-4342 or visit online at go.carleton.edu/museum.