High Arctic at the National Maritime Museum- 07.14.11
High Arctic is a stunning new installation in the National Maritime Museum’s brand new Sammy Ofer Wing which will opens to the public today, July 14th.
The installation is an eerie futuristic work is a collaboration between the National Maritime Museum, UVA (UnitedVisualArtists) and Cape Farewell. The exhibition is designed to capture the scale, beauty and fragility of our arctic environment. The installation was created as a response to the arctic journey of Matt Clark of UVA, who traveled with the arts and climate science foundation Cape Farewell to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in September 2010 aboard the 100-year old Dutch schooner, the Noorderlicht.
A highly interactive space, the exhibition turns visitors into explorers armed with handheld blacklights to discover the dark and everchanging environment while listening to snippets of narration from Arctic explorers (a soundscape created by Max Eastley and Henrik Ekeus from the voices of Arctic explorers and poetry of Nick Drake). The beautiful projections respond dynamically to the approach and movements of visitors and the blacklights reveal glimmers in the exhibition floor and to discover the thousands of columns which represent the real glaciers of Svalbard.
Find out more at the exhibition’s page on the UVA website and its page on the National Maritime Museum site. More photos and videos of the installation after the jump!
The installation is housed in the new visiting exhibition space in the basement of the Sammy Ofer Wing and will run until January 2012.
Entering an immersive, responsive world armed with a blacklight to explore.
The thousands of columns throughout the gallery each represent a real glacier in Svalbard and the blacklight reveals each column’s name.
There are also reflective lines and fragments to be discovered throughout the gallery space.
