Charles Stankievech
The Central Gallery
January 30 to May 15, 2027
Curated by Charo Neville
The idea of the North looms large in our collective imagination. A place where the cosmic meets the terrestrial, the Arctic has been imagined both as a sublime spiritual and celestial wonderland and as a dark continent, where aliens and meteorites descend upon vast uninhabited icefields. In old maps, the Arctic has been mythologized as terra incognita. Parallel to these fantastical narratives, the Arctic has long been a critical battle ground for border transgression, natural resource extraction, and invisible military operations. Today, it is both a real and symbolic site for the tipping point of climate change, with glaciers rapidly melting, and the focus of nationalist threats for domination over cultural sovereignty where cycles of colonialism repeat and re-entrench.
This tension between fact and fiction in the North has been at the core of Charles Stankievech’s practice for over two decades. This exhibition brings together four key projects by Stankievech that map the architecture of the Distant Early Warning Line (DEW Line), a joint venture between the US Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force that manifested as a network of remote radar and communication outposts extending across the high Arctic from Alaska and Canada to Denmark’s Greenland. Militaristic occupation of the North began in the Cold War and continues to have present day implications through what the artist has termed our current Warm War.
Drawing on his firsthand experience living in the North, both as a founding faculty of the Yukon School of Visual Arts and as an artist in residence embedded within the Canadian Department of National Defence, Stankievech’s focus on the Arctic brings to light ideological connections between the militaristic presence and utopian imaginings in this region. Through his seminal works, LOVELAND (2009-2011), Soniferious Æther (2011-2013), Monument as Ruin (2011-2015), and Until Finally O Became Just a Dot (2017), Stankievech uses video, sculpture, archival material, and found and reinvented objects to explore the implications of the military industrial complex in the North. Together, these works point to the impact of such longstanding militaristic presence on Northern architecture and communication systems, the global climate emergency and land sovereignty. These works represent the ambitious and rigorous complexity of Stankievech’s interdisciplinary practice, which integrates multiple fields of interest, including history, science, literature, philosophy, and popular culture.
As the artist argued in his 2010 curatorial project Magnetic Norths, “far from being an empty terra incognita, the Arctic[…] functions both as a historical repository and as a fantasy projection space that generates electro-magnetic distortions, pay dirt, pissing contests, sci-fi warfare, psychedelic skies, conspiracy theories, critical confections, shamanistic loss and shattered cartographies.” Stankievech’s work utilizes apocalyptic tropes to highlight the precarious and problematic position of the North in relation to the current political and ecological context. With his intense focus in the North through fieldwork and site-specific projects, Stankievech uses this extreme environment as a platform for bringing to light its historic and current day importance as a real and symbolic site of global insecurity.
Charles Stankievech
The Soniferous Æther of The Land Beyond The Land Beyond, 2011–2013
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