Impact and Entanglement: Three Video Works by Christina Seely

EXHIBITION ON VIEW OCTOBER 10, 2026 – JANUARY 3, 2027
WAPITI GALLERY

Impact and Entanglement: Three Video Works by Christina Seely

For over twenty years, artist Christina Seely has traveled alongside scientists to the Arctic and the tropics, translating those encounters into immersive video and sound installations that probe our shifting relationship to the nonhuman world. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, Seely works across photography, sound, and architecture to ask what it means to witness a planet in flux—and what role the witness herself plays in that story.

Impact and Entanglement brings together three of Seely’s major video works, each drawn from firsthand expeditions to some of the planet’s most climate-vulnerable regions, alongside a series of striking photographic portraits.

De Tempore (“out of time”) layers footage gathered in the arctic archipelago of Svalbard and the tropical islands of the Galápagos. Snow falling in darkness and the sun setting at hyper-speed represent the instability of seemingly fixed indicators of time and the implied impacts of climate change on the environments and species depicted.

Deflou Animales turns to the walrus—a species, like our own, newly vulnerable to a warming world. Ghosted photographic portraits pair with a dual-screen video installation shot on Moffen Island, 80 degrees north in the Svalbard Territory, where a herd of walrus moves slowly through a snowstorm alongside human figures who eventually vanish into the same barren terrain. The deliberate grain and noise of the footage keeps the camera itself in view, a quiet reminder that we so often meet this crisis through a screen.

Disturbance, which debuted at the Anchorage Museum of Art in 2021, is built from paired field recordings made with sound engineer Christopher Hedge: a thawing Alaskan winterscape along Anchorage Bay, its stillness split by the roar of cargo jets overhead, set against the tropical rainforest soundscape of the Panama Canal, where the low bass rumble of container ships pushes through the trees. Together, the two locations trace a single, invisible network of global shipping—and the toll it takes on the natural soundscapes it passes through.

Accompanying the three video works is Species Impact, a set of ten daguerreotype portraits of animals photographed in the wild across expeditions to Greenland, the Alaskan Arctic, the Svalbard Territory, and the Galápagos between 2012 and 2016. Each species represents a distinct facet of climate change—ocean acidification, sea level rise, food supply depletion, shifting migratory patterns. The daguerreotype process itself becomes part of the work’s meaning: its mirrored surface shifts between ghostly negative, faint positive, and the viewer’s own reflection, making it impossible to view the animal without also seeing yourself entangled in its fate.

Across the video works and the daguerreotypes alike, Seely asks visitors to set aside the distance of the screen and return to the body as a place of knowing—to feel, rather than simply observe, the entanglement of human and wild lives on a changing planet.