Exhibition: Momentum

Christina Seely

April 7 - May 3

Strauss Gallery

Reception: April 7, 5:45pm

Artist Event: Draw of Darkness

Thursday, April 9, 4:30pm Hood Auditorium

Christina Seely is an artist and educator whose photographic practice stretches into the fields of science, design and architecture. Interested in humans’ contemporary relationship to nature and time, Seely’s expedition based work finds its home in the conversation between the photographic image and our contemporary relationship with the natural world.

The exhibition Momentum combines works from Christina Seely’s projects Lux and Markers of Time that address the complexities of our contemporary relationship to the planet.

The Lux (2005-2010) project is made up of large-scale photographic portraits of (45) cities within the most brightly illuminated regions on the NASA map of the night earth (2002). Lux, focuses on cities in the brightest regions on this map; the United States, Western Europe and Japan. These economically and politically powerful regions not only have the greatest impact on the night sky but this brightness reflects a dominant cumulative impact on the planet. The project makes plain the multi-layered role of power on a global scale while the cumulative brightness of these regions amplifies a deep disconnect from natural cycles of day and night.

The ongoing project Markers of Time (2010 -) uses photographic media, text based pieces, performance and collaborative works, to consider how time is measured and experienced within our complex and ever-changing relationship to systems of the planet. Works culled from expeditionary travels to the arctic and tropics examine understandings of time and place.

Seely’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is featured in many public and private collections including; The Museum of Contemporary Photography, The West Collection and The Walker Art Center. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, a participant on the Arctic Circle Program, and a recipient of a year long Public Arts Commission from the city of San Francisco. Most recently she received the 2014 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, her first monograph Lux, will be co-published in 2014 by Radius Books and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and work from her latest project, Markers of Time was recently included the exhibition Staking Claim: A California Invitational at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. She received a BA from Carleton College, an MFA in Photography from Rhode Island School of Design, and recently began a tenure track post as Assistant Professor in the Studio Art Department at Dartmouth College in Hanover NH.