The Brooklyn Rail

Tristan Duke was sailing to the Arctic on a tall ship called the Antigua in spring 2022 when COVID-19 overtook the crew. The twenty-first century plague ship was briefly barred from its port, but Duke, battling the virus and bouts of seasickness, found a way to launch an experimental photography project. Landing on a remote bank, he gathered chunks of glacial ice, crafted them into lenses, and captured his environs on giant negatives using a tent-sized pinhole camera.

Duke’s camera obscura sits dormant in the lobby of SITE Santa Fe as a preface to his solo exhibition Glacial Optics. Nearby, a short video and the aluminum mold he heats to shape the ice lenses further demystify the photographs inside SITE’s prow-shaped front gallery. This preemptive tangle of instruments and information clashes with sensuously refracted imagery from Duke’s voyage, setting the tone for a show strung between the fever dream of its inception and the nuts and bolts of a climate meltdown.

This isn’t the first time the Los Angeles-based artist has lugged an unwieldy camera on an epic adventure: as part of a multidisciplinary art and research collective, he took an American road trip in a pinhole camera on wheels, documenting industrial wastelands and often developing the photos in toxic sludge. The Arctic expedition was a bigger challenge with uncertain results: on a placard in the show, Duke details his hypothesis that the ice lenses could be too hazy, resolving only “abstract fields of gray.”

There are three large format pinhole photographs with Arctic origins in the exhibition, and they are representational but unremarkable, reading like mundane documentation from a late nineteenth-century expedition (the three-masted Antigua appears in one of them). Ice makes an okay lens, but the project’s other constraints—the narrow temporal and compositional parameters of shooting in this manner, in a severe locale—make the final monochrome images feel like research byproducts.

Brandee Caoba, who is SITE’s in-house curator and first engaged with Duke before his Arctic adventure, seems keenly aware of this issue. Her interpretive runway outside the show includes wall text discussing Duke’s desire to “transcend photography’s role as a document” and explore “the poetic and diagnostic potential of glacial ice.” It’s a subtle nod to the challenges of making art from science—of swirling poetics with diagnostics—to which the opening passage of the exhibition becomes a self-conscious tribute.

Western art and science have been spiritually entwined since the Renaissance and Indigenous aesthetics and technologies melded in prehistory, yet contemporary art seems bedeviled by data’s potential as an artistic medium, instead dumbly plunking icebergs on the streets of Paris and the like. Caoba and Duke’s answer is to bolster every wall with written descriptions, to varying degrees of necessity.

Duke is an inspired inventor, after all, and for every elaborate misfire there’s a stab in the dark that connects with ersatz electricity. The Glacial Optics series is the headliner, but Caoba hustles past it to a photography series Duke made using a digital camera retrofitted with ice lenses. Freed from the stasis of the camera obscura but subject to the hypersensitivity of a modern instrument, Duke leans into the melty materiality of the ice between his eye and the world, producing lush-and-brushy color imagery that nods to Turner and Friedrich.

This series, titled Arctic Expedition, is where Duke lands his concept of channeling the “gaze of the glacier.” Anthropomorphizing an imperiled landform is so romantic—and Romantic—that it seems just as likely to blur one’s view of a glacier’s complex plight as to clarify it. The central image in the trio depicts a crowded landing party in a classical pyramid composition—humanity’s fervent but absurdly small rescue crew swallowed by an atmospheric, rising ocean.

In the second half of the show, Duke and Caoba take a flying leap to northern New Mexico. A time lapse video shot through a melting ice lens, forged from Santa Fe tap water, swiftly abstracts a patch of forest ravaged by the record-breaking Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire of 2022 (which started the same season as Duke’s northern journey). The work’s soundtrack effectively evokes dripping water and crackling fire. Woozy images of charred borderlands hillsides made with the iced digital camera complete the arc between disparate, highly politicized, and liminal zones—no further context required, although it is provided.

A closing series of enormous photograms (2023–24), which show ice cores and scientific equipment in silhouette, drives home Duke’s art-and-science quandary. This is the most crisply defined imagery in the show, and the objects’ backstories are fascinating (a sled that NASA used to collect meteorites atop the Arctic ice) and urgent (ice core samples that hold the histories of extinct glaciers). However, I could feel Duke’s wheels furiously turning as I viewed the imagery: how to distill and elucidate, visually flatten but rhetorically expand, before all the glacial ice is gone for good?