Spring Art + Design Faculty Lecture Series: Annie Eawskio

I explore northern regions as “Thule” – the location-less, mythical, hyperborean land once taken as fact based on the reports of an early Greek explorer, Pytheas, whose journey to “Thule” was later recorded in some of the earliest remaining written accounts of Arctic exploration in the Western world. These paintings envision the release of old secrets, spirits, bodies, precious natural materials, and ghosts in the ice. In the face of climate breakdown, traversing the Arctic becomes casual, oil companies speculate, geopolitics intensify, and underwater archeologists solve mysteries from 19th-century lost expeditions. I insert objects and narratives from contemporary life, such as a Russian submarine’s robotic arm planting a flag on the seafloor underneath the North Pole, and envision future scenarios, like a repurposed White Castle functioning as a hub for lonely travelers on Ski-Doos.

Lately, my research has taken me to multilayered interpretations of fortresses and forests: Superman’s fortress of solitude was in the Arctic, “The Fortress” is what scientific researchers in the Mosaic mission call their strongest zone of the frozen ice cap, to which they have moored their vessel for an entire year, Trump’s White House is fortress-like in its insularity against contrarian voices, and writers predict fortresses of the rich when considering our dark and dystopian future. The forested regions of Labrador, or “Markland” in Norse, are where Vikings sailed to gather timber when they settled tree-less Greenland centuries ago.

My oil paintings take shape in conversation with other modes of visual thinking: drawings, works on paper, photographs, and sculptural collage. It’s a process of continuous movement as my ideas transform from one medium to the next. I create noisy, distorted, unreadable, supernatural spaces, in flux, spanning thousands of years from the past to the unknown future.

This event is open to the public.