In this moment of great urgency, contemporary art, in dialogue with scientific data-driven communication, can supply a powerful and necessary space of emotional and spiritual holding to help us grapple with the most pressing existential questions brought on by contemporary environmental realities. The artist will draw from ten years of direct experience working in natural history museums and witnessing the exponential evolution of the climate crisis alongside scientists in the Arctic, and the tropics. The talk will examine past and present approaches that aim to aid and activate the comprehension of our inherent entanglement with the Earth through perceivings of the fragile and interlaced energetics of bodily and planetary systems.

This talk will include a screening of Christina Seely’s short film Dissonance, filmed in summer 2019 on a rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet while traveling with the Institute of Arctic Studies.

Christina Seely’s multidisciplinary photographic practice stretches into the fields of science, design, installation, and sound and culminates in a range of visual and collaborative translations. Often bearing first-hand witness alongside scientists in the field as the climate crisis has evolved and established, the arc of her research-based practice over more than a decade maps our increasingly tenuous relationship to the natural world while suggesting new ways of sensing the self inside the realities of the climate crisis.