Exhibitions 2025

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The Vanishing

Sebastian Copeland

The Vanishing chronicles over 25 years of Arctic travels, documenting some of the least visited cryosphere on Earth. Specialized in the polar regions, I have made it my life's mission to amplify nature’s glorious voice and the profound cellular nexus that connects us.

Ice is mostly misperceived as an inanimate form. It is in fact a dynamic element whose life cycle is not entirely different from our own, except of course for the timescales. Some of the ice portrayed in this exhibit can be over one million years old!

Ice is born of water, it travels, it interacts; the more vulnerable fades early, while the rest continues its voyage, as dictated by gravity when it finally makes its way to the sea, its final resting place. There, it will melt back to its original liquid form, and in doing so feed the birth of the next ice. Buddhists would be quick to see in hydrology a cycle that parallels our own.

THE VANISHING is an invitation to escape to this exotic world; and to bridge the gulf that has grown between humans and the natural world. By generating an emotional attachment, it aims to elicit a contemplation on how to realign our mutual philosophies. THE VANISHING is also an urgent call to change course on humanity’s unchecked growth and its destructive impact on all life. In a warming world, ice is the first to go, but certainly won't be the last. When Nature speaks and we fail to listen, photography can make us hear with our eyes. And beauty is our unifying link to Nature. It gives the heart the arguments to commit the mind to a program of action.

The Hunters

The Inuit are the human population of the high Arctic. They are the custodians of tradition, living from the hunt in traditional ways that have remained mostly unchanged for 45,000 years. Inuit are finely attuned to their environment and have managed to coexist among some of Nature's harshest conditions.

The Inughuit displayed in these photos belong to a small tribe of about 800 individuals indigenous to the very northern parts of Greenland. This region is the last place on Earth where dogsleds are foundational to the community by facilitating the hunt over the sea ice. Their dogs are a unique breed which has never mixed with other dogs and whose bloodline is the closest known to wolves.

With their dependence on dogs and the sea ice for the hunt, these Arctic tribes and their traditions are some of the first in line to suffer from climate transformations.

The Cryosphere

The Cryosphere features the polar ice and its natural world. Ice is regulated by seasonal cycles, expanding and contracting annually. In recent decades, the Arctic has warmed at up to seven times the global average, negatively impacting its ice mass balance. Simply put, the Arctic loses more ice annually than it produces. This affects both the floating sea ice in extent and thickness, and the grounded icesheets by reducing their volume. During the warm season large icebergs will break to the sea from glaciers, having traveled across an icesheet for what could be millions of years. When seasonal temperatures drop, these icebergs will get trapped in the sea ice where they will spend the winter. By the onset of spring, the sea ice begins to loosen its frozen grip. These icebergs will soon float again, moving away out to sea where they will eventually return to their original liquid state.

I am interested in that intermediate stage, playing off the reflections in the melt ponds to contrast the two realities: what is, and what appears to be. On the surface, icebergs can seem fierce in size and appearance. But their reflection speaks to their vulnerability and a reality that is not so different than our own: defiant, fragile and fleeting.