oona stern - monacobreen

In October 2011 visual artist Oona Stern and composer Cheryl Leonard sailed in the Svalbard archipelago with the Arctic Circle artist residency. We gathered material for Adfreeze Project, a series of portraits of select sites in the region. Our first piece, Monacobreen, is based on glacier ice in Liefdefjorden, on the north side of Spitsbergen. A composition using field recordings is combined with video projected onto the floor of the gallery, overlaying a pattern of stones. A silhouette of the glacier is rendered on the walls. The installation brings aspects of Svalbard's unique environment into the gallery, in a way which places the viewer into the glacial fjord itself, conveying the nature of light, sound, space, and time from a remote region. Combining scientific practices (research) with artistic ones (presentation), Adfreeze is part of a new generation of earthworks which seek not only to (re)present nature, but to facilitate the growing desire of people all over to live with nature rather than try to conquer it.