Using camera lenses made of Arctic ice, Tristan Duke's ongoing, experimental photographic project, Glacial Optics, explores our current moment of climate crisis.
In the spring of 2022, artist Tristan Duke set sail for the Arctic Island of Svalbard, the fastest-warming place on the planet. His goal was to craft functioning camera lenses from the very ice of the glaciers. Through melting ice lenses, Duke captured portraits of an Arctic landscape in quiet turmoil. These ephemeral lenses became the foundation for a photographic series imagining the "gaze of the glazier" as a means of confronting the global climate emergency.
On returning from the Arctic, Duke turned his ice-lens camera to document massive wildfires raging across the American West — bringing the melting glaciers to bear witness to the smoke and fire of the Anthropocene.
Next, Duke traveled the country visiting labs where scientists study glacier ice for clues to better predict our climate future. By laying ice core samples directly on large sheets of photo paper, Duke created photograms, distilling the concept of the ice lens into formal studies of light moving through ice.
Glacial Optics includes essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Mark Cheetham, William L. Fox, and Brandee Caoba, with a foreword from Michael Govan, as well as the artist's field notes and original research chronicling the unlikely history of ice lenses.
Tristan Duke is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography, holography, video, installation, and other experimental media. With a special interest in light, optics, and visual perception, Duke’s work explores how we seek knowledge about ourselves and the world. Duke’s work often incorporates technologies and processes of his own invention, such as his
Glacial Optics project: using camera lenses made from ice to explore the glacier as a literal and poetic lens through which to understand our times.
As the recipient of the 2023/2024 LACMA Art and Technology Lab Grant, Duke is continuing to build on his Glacial Optics Series, exploring cutting edge science on and in the glaciers –with partners including the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF), the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC), The Nevada Museum of Art Center for Art + Environment, and many others. Duke has pioneered numerous holographic technologies, including creating the first ever 3D hologram vinyl records. He has created original hologram artwork for many albums and soundtrack releases ranging from Jack White to Guns ‘n Roses and Star Wars, earning him a Clio Award in 2016. His holographic album artwork has been featured on the Tonight Show, and in Rolling Stone, Forbes, The Verge, Gizmodo and many more.
From 2010-2023 Duke worked in collaboration with artists Lauren Bon and Rich Nielsen, forming the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio, a collective project seeking to recontextualizing photography as a land-based medium and social practice. He has shared his work internationally, with exhibitions and public talks at institutions including the MIT Media Lab, the Getty Museum, the Santa Fe Institute, Tamarind Institute, the de Young Museum, the Exploratorium, RISD, C|O Berlin, LACMA, MASS MoCA, and many others.
Tristan Duke (b. 1981) is an artist and experimental photographer whose work investigates perception, deep time, and environmental change. His practice is driven by a fascination with how we see and understand the world—both through the limits of human vision and the expanded possibilities offered by optical and scientific instruments. By building his own cameras, inventing new photographic processes, and engaging in material experimentation, Duke reimaginges the role of photography as a tool for art and inqiury. Duke has shared his work internationally, with exhibitions and lectures at institutions including the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne, MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, MA), Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Santa Fe Institute, SITE Santa Fe, Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA), Rhode Island School of Design (Providence), C|O Berlin, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), and many others.
Brandee Caoba is an artist, curator, and visual activist. As curator at SITE Santa Fe she has organized an extensive run of exhibitions over the past eight years, working with national and international artists to address issues of climate disruption, global displacement, privatized prison systems, and feminism. Her curatorial practice introduces narratives that prompt dialogue on social change, raise political consciousness, and propose alternate ways of seeing and thinking.
Mark A. Cheetham (b. 1954) is professor of art history and visual culture at the University of Toronto. His research and writing centers on art art from the mid 18th century to the present in Britain, Europe, the USA, and Canada, with a current focus on contemporary ecological art, Ecocritical Art History, and the image cultures of nineteenth-century Arctic voyaging from the Anglosphere.
William L. Fox (b. 1949) is an art critic, artist, author, cultural geographer, editor and poet who has served as the Director of the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art since 2009. Fox has edited and written for publications worldwide and is known for his leadership of various programs in the arts and humanities across the American West.
Michael Govan (b. 1963) is the director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Prior to his current position, Govan worked as the director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York City.
Lucy Lippard (b. 1937) is an American activist, feminist, art critic, and curator renowned for her many articles and books on contemporary art. She has been contributing to art publications for over sixty years, and has written twenty-six art historical and creative non-fiction books. She is a co-founder of Printed Matter, the Heresies Collective, Political Art Documentation/Distribution, and other artists' organizations and has curated over fifty exhibitions. Her latest title, entitled Stuff: Instead of a Memoir, was published in 2023. Lippard is based in Galisteo, New Mexico.
