Until There is No Sun

Clare Benson • Filter Space, Chicago, January 7 – February 12, 2022

"There is a place in the far north of Scandinavia, north of the Arctic Circle line, where winter winds and wild skies and the back-and-forth of freezing and unfreezing create a landscape like no other. In the months that mark the end of one year and the beginning of another, the sky shifts into darkness. Each day, a calculated eight minutes of sun is lost, until there is no sun left to lose. And then it is dark; it is a continuing reminder of the tilted axis of the earth, when part of the world turns its back to the sun.

“My tenure above the Arctic Circle lasted nearly as long as an entire trip around the sun. In this time I worked alongside space physicists, indigenous reindeer herders, and a neuroscientist who studies the eyes of Arctic reindeer. This continuing body of work explores relationships and contradictions— of light and seeing, of science and ancient myth, of that which we know and that which we continue to seek." —Clare Benson