the big questions

This place, this big dead place, is so alive. My appreciation for repetition is mimicked all around me. Subtle repetition, similarity again and again. I find satiating pleasure in the landscape. The white repeats itself over and over again- changing tones, minute by minutes, lit with different forces, reflecting and refracting glows, often fading into a featureless white expanse.

From my perch, the driver’s seat of a 44,000 lb Delta, VAST is the only appropriate word.




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My everyday questions have expanded with the horizon. The biggest: “What does a sustainable life look like for me?” How can I be on a middle path, my veins pulsing with passions, and my body attentively stopped to notice the diesel fumes or to hear nothing, resting snow?

In the past this same question of sustainability meant: “Where should I buy my food? Where should I live? What type of job should I have? What kind of partner will share happiness with me? How can I decrease my environmental footprint?”

But now, this question of sustainability is holistically different. I want to develop a lifestyle that suits me personally. I want to build patterns that instigate spontaneity and surprise—that are built upon flexible poignant change.

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Today, in a low moment of weariness, I found myself thinking, “When I go back to the states I will have to tell people that I have done NOTHING with the past months, with this one long ongoing day of sunlight. Everyone goes to Antarctica!"



Hours later, I laughed at myself realizing that I AM TOASTY! I really have been isolated here. Of course everyone in Antarctica goes to Antarctica. No one I meet here doesn’t.

We are in this together.



My community of intellectual forklift operators, spiritual mechanics, hitchhiking utility technicians, and artistic cargo handlers—we are bound together here on this “harsh” continent; we choose to be without any other option.

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“How can I open myself to life?” In Chicago, I was making artwork about attentiveness, but struggled to step away from my making to enjoy an unstructured, plan-free afternoon. Was I not living a contradiction? I seek to let my art practice be inter-dependent with my daily life. How can I balance my ambition with rest? My direction with wonderment? And most importantly, what experiences do I need to create (and open myself to) in order to teach my body the value of the middle path.


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I ask life questions. I create things figure them out. Sometimes the making is an experience, a moment, a gesture. I guess I just like creating.

While I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, I desired to mimic the artist Kimsooja. (www.Kimsooja.com) Upon a one on one meeting with her I decided I could not mimic her because my work, even my mimicry, needs to come from within myself. Last month, her work came through my body. Instead of becoming a needle weaving together a river of passing people, I became the silence of vastness. I was an embodied a photograph, living stillness.

I want to choose a state of being over achievement. Where does this locate my art in the world, within myself, in life?

still, cold blank video

The ice shelf is an expanse of permanently frozen ocean; 40 meters of packed snow and ice floats on 120 meters of the ocean water. I rode a shuttle, which I regularly drive, out to ice shelf. The air was perfectly still that day. I chose a spot just off the snow road where a simple perfectly straight line divided the snow from the sky. When the van drove away, a silence unlike any silence found in inhabited places, hung in the cold afternoon air. I sat the camera down on the ground and stood unmoving next to it for 20 minutes, tape continually running. This cold sit is a physically trying experience, even on a moderate day in Antarctica.

Then with a few crunches I entered the framed landscape. The camera still rolling, I mindfully stopped. Dropped to my knees—again perfectly still, I rested there. For five minutes the camera records the silence.

Even to people here on the ice, they perceived the video to be a still photograph until I entered the frame.

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I miss, so much do I miss, the smells of “bio-matter”, and the rustle of wind dancing through leaves-the sounds trees, and cardinal’s song.

But no doubt, I will long for this vastness and silence once I deploy.

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The US Coast Guard Icebreaker has just broken a passageway, The Channel, through the ice shelf.

Last week I took a cruise down the channel.









A fuel tanker and a large vessel full of supplies will sail in next week. We prepare for ship offload, an event that our entire existence here depends on. Without a doubt the next few weeks will fly by.

(And it did. The Fuel Tanker, and the Nathanial B. Palmer research vessel both arrived while the Coast Guard Icebreaker circled in the bay for days!)



Soon our Air National Guard Chariot-a C17 bomber--will take me off the Ice.

Then, I will bask in natural darkness, with stars above.

iced

At present, I sit quietly. I feel as though I am in a library; computers hum, dry recycled air blows against my face. Yet unlike a library at home, this space embodies a quiet I have not heard for months. Different from the absent silence out on the ice, this space is quiet socially. I am nearly alone. One man sits in the corner to my right, reading on a sofa in a carpeted kitchen cove. I assume he is a research assistant, also trying to get away.

I face a periodical-magazine display. The magazines are organized alphabetically. Beginning with Chemi de Erde: Geochemistry. Dozens line the shelves, propped at forty-five degree angles, tempting me. Their titles: BioProbes 45, EOS, Nature, Oceanus, Physics Today, Science. The last stack of magazines displays bold words:

Terra Antarctica.

It is 9:32 pm; 21:32.

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To my left, a long unbroken line of windows spans the room. The night sunlight, diffused by the vast thick clouds that nearly touch the surface of the bay, envelops my lap. The light remains so bright I consider wearing sunglasses. But, I always have a pair on; this one-hour without them is divine. A thin golden beam that edges the massive storm front above marks the white horizon. Hundreds of miles of frozen ocean span below, thick sea ice to the southwest, and a permanent snow shelf to the southeast. I mark the north.

A helicopter momentarily breaks through my mental rest, loudly humming into my hideaway.

I am still on the seventh continent, a shocking awaking, yet one that is my everyday. Monotony infused with un-forsaken awe.