refurbished vintage motion lamp, photograph and collage on backlit film
12 × 6 in (30.5 × 15.2 cm) (diameter)
Sold
$2,160
Provenance
Courtesy of the Artist
Laura Millard was part of an invited group of artists and scientists on the Arctic Circle Alumni Residency in the Arctic Archipelago of Svalbard in the summer of 2024. These islands at 82 degrees north are heating more quickly than anywhere else on the planet, with dramatically negative effect. Among Millard’s reckonings with this reality is a suite of motion lamps that combine her photographs of disappearing glaciers with lamps that rotate thanks to heat convection from their bulbs. Popular in the mid-twentieth century as mementos of tourist sites such as Niagara Falls, Millard reconstitutes the lamps themselves and what they show to underline the increase in global temperatures in the increasingly touristic far north. People watch this happening in her images, but as in Crossing 1, we humans are turning to climate issues too slowly, even pointlessly ‘going in circles.’ The lamps seem as poignantly fragile as the ecologies they present.
