Performances happening in the Selma Wolf Black Great Hall at 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.
Free; registration encouraged
Using both the oral tradition in Arctic Indigenous cultures and the deployment of images of disappearing global ice, Joan Kane, writer and theorist, will read poems from her most recent publication, Dark Traffic, with the projected video work, Ice Machine, by North Atlantic Triennial artist, Justin Levesque. This performance invites us to consider how our assumptions of the changing Arctic are formed through the digital creation of new ice and through the reading and recitation of Inupiaq poetry.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq. The author of several collections of poetry and prose, most recently Dark Traffic, she is currently a lecturer in the department of studies in Race, Colonialism and Diaspora at Tufts, and teaches creative writing at Harvard, Tufts, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She raises her sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her second book, Hyperboreal, is being published in a French translation in 2022 by Editions Caractères.
Justin Levesque is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Portland, Maine. His work considers the materiality and tradition of photography in relationship to information exchange and mediated geographies. Levesque has exhibited nationally and internationally (the Center for Maine Contemporary Art; the Midwest Center for Photography; Terrault Contemporary; JanKossen Contemporary; Shape Arts, London; and The Factory, Gamla Síldarverksmiðjan, Djúpavík, Iceland). He’s received three Maine Arts Commission Artist Project grants and was named one of thirteen emerging photographers by Maine Media Workshops + College. He was a fellow of The Arctic Circle in Svalbard, and created independent artist residencies with Eimskip, Portland, ME / Iceland; Bigelow Laboratories for Ocean Sciences; the New England Ocean Cluster; and the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center.