The outpost: A little wooden shelter on precarious ground for a geologist and a photographer to capture change in the 24-hour Arctic summer; cartographers of the freezing and partial thawing and refreezing of the thin top layer of melted permafrost on which the ecosystem existentially depends. The geologist augurs soil cores every year from 99 points in the landscape; the photographer captures the tundra in situ, defined in its absence of verticality and the bisection of perspective into minutiae on the ground and infinity in the sky.
The archive: A roadside spectacle on the only highway to the Arctic Ocean in the world. An archive of the smelly dirt of the tundra, permafrost strata asserting its agency as a monumental form overhead rather than a passive condition underfoot. A long path out from the road into the landscape, a refrigerated excavation for the (re)storing of cores back into the ground.
