PHOTOGRAPHY: JESSICA HOUSTON

HORIZON FELT

Crossing The Line (2015)
Archival Pigmented Print, 22 x 33 inches

The Greening (2015)
Archival Pigmented Print, 22 x 33 inches

Ideas in Things (2018)
Archival Pigmented Print, 22 x 33 inches

The Horizon Felt photographs use color to create new cartographies of the polar regions. Using the horizon and colours from the landscape as points of reference, Jessica Houston placed different coloured felt in front of her lens while photographing the north and south poles. Abandoned outposts, remote scientific stations, and retreating glaciers speak to the life of places and the storied matter that shapes them. These photographs take stock of the embedded histories of the poles and their entanglement of colonialism, capitalism and environmental injustice, while opening up a space for rethinking the ‘natural’.

Jessica Houston travels from pole to pole—using objects, oral narratives, photography, and painting. Her collaborative projects include site-specific oral histories that amplify place as a living process and build knowledge across and human and more-than-human spectrum. She works on projects involving communities and their relationship to their environments in the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, and Italy. Houston has created site-specific works for the New Jersey MOCA, Asbury Park, New Jersey; the Castello di Corigliano, Puglia, Italy; Governors Island, NY, NY; and The Albany Airport, Albany, NY. Her works are funded by The Canada Council for the Arts and are in the collections of Prêt d’oeuvres d’art, Musée National Des Beaux-Arts du Quebec;Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ), Montréal, Québec; Bank of Montréal, Toronto; and the Consulate General of Monaco, Montréal. She has been invited to The Albers Foundation Residency, CAMAC Centre for Art, Science and Technology in France, and Skagaströnd in Iceland.