Open Polar Sea  2024– ongoing

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There is an empty circle at the top of the world. Sitting at my computer before a residency in the Arctic, I zoomed in on Landsat maps of the North Pole. Near the pole, the imagery simply stopped. I later learned the gap marks the limit of the satellites' orbits, which never cross the pole. For a while it was my Open Polar Sea, my Hyperborea, a blank where my imagination could run.

 

Standing on a high cliff above the 81st parallel, two men looked north onto open water stretching as far as they could see. It was 1854. Hans Hendrik and William Morton were part of Elisha Kent Kane's expedition in search of the lost Franklin crews. Kane announced to the world that they had found the Open Polar Sea, an "open and iceless area, abounding with life." No one doubted them; everyone had expected to find it. Now the observation systems orbiting overhead record what the explorers wanted to see: open water where the ice used to be.

 

Both blanks sit at the edge of a record, where the instrument or the account runs out and what we expect fills the space. Making these works, I try to enter that blank with my body, to stand where the record stops. One work is a portrait of the missing top of the world, a stepped hole the shape of the data gap, cut through a field of engravings from Kane's 1856 account of the voyage, Arctic Explorations.