The Physical Geography of the Sea is a collaborative work with Aly Ogasian. It reveals a buoy tracing the flow of the gulf stream from the Gulf of Mexico to Danskøya (an island in the High Arctic where Artctic explorer SA Andrée built his balloon house), and into the pack ice near the North Pole, marking significant points that intersect with Andrée’s expedition route. The work combines text from our personal expedition journals, the journals of an early arctic explorer, and the writings of Mathew Fontaine Maury, father of modern oceanography.

The Physical Geography of the Sea

Collaborative project with Aly Ogasian.  Our sculptures double as instruments that are precariously positioned in cracks and crevices in the rocky shoreline, measuring the weather conditions of the island on a micro scale. The work uses wind, light, color, and waves to visualize patterns that are ephemeral and imperceptible. They serve as a poetic annotation to the daily NOAA weather reports

Keweenaw Observing Station

This body of work creates both a space and a void. It speaks of the moment after an utterance, before the utterance reaches another. It fails at communication, but tells you that it is possible. It underscores the absence of being there. My work revolves around my desire to substantiate my existence, and the need to reach out beyond my isolation to connect with the viewer.

Semaphore

This work points to a never-ending process, a series of attempts to measure an infinite line, to chart the color of the sky, to capture the single point where a shift occurs in a limitless expanse. Using altered surveying equipment I document the sea and the process of being in between two places.
Departing from the familiar, I begin a process of navigating the unknown. Through this transit, I extend my own boundaries into un-encountered territory and embrace the unforeseen. Using devices that refer to both the past and the future without positioning themselves in either, I displace fragments of landscape, allowing you to experience places and events in many ways at once. These constructed tools take in light and reflect my surroundings, allowing me to measure and record my position in relation to the infinite horizon line, or the apex of a wave.

Seeing, counting, and measuring are ways of understanding; creating tools to record and quantify these measurements allows me to understand them in relation to myself. Using these devices, I attempt to orient myself by examining place via the lens of personal experience and primary observation, often selecting points that are ultimately impossible to calibrate against.

Arc of Visility

Collaborative Project with Aly Ogasian. Farthest North synthesizes the profound psychological effect of traversing one of the most rarefied places on Earth in the footprints of a failed explorer. In 1897, explorer S.A. Andrée attempted to fly to the North Pole in a silk hydrogen balloon. Andrée intended to be first to the North Pole, and planned to map the region using aerial cameras engineered for cartographic use. Shortly after taking off from the archipelago of Svalbard, however, the expedition crashed. Their remains were found 33 years later, the cause of their deaths unknown. Amongst the remains were several canisters of exposed film, preserved in the snow.

Miles away in space and time, we spent the better part of 2016 deciphering the topography of the arctic landscape through the flat surface of a screen, closely inspecting each pixel. Later that summer, we travelled to the high arctic, retracing the route of Andrée. From the top of a mountain, we gazed across Virgohamna, the same arctic harbor that appears in Andrée’s photographs, and below them observed the remains of his balloon hangar, ravaged by the harsh climate.

Farthest North

The Kronstadt tide gauge was called the Hub of the Universe by Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. It is the site from which all depths and altitudes in Russia are measured and determined, and it is one of the most comprehensive collections of sea-level data in the world. In Levelling Network, the tide gauge is a site of knowledge and ritual. It is used as a reference point to understand my surrounding landscape, to measure my relationship to it, and to investigate the history of Kotlin island.

I traveled to the tide gauge every day for 2 weeks to take measurements, and each night I analyzed and dissected these measurements in my studio space. From my window, the Kronstadt Naval Cathedral was well lit at all hours and its presence became a constant beacon filling up the space. The dome became my navigational aid and a benchmark by which all other things were measured.

This is a work about the tide— about taking measure and failing to communicate, both through language and data. Levelling Network explores my relationship with the tide gauge and the naval cathedral dome and displays how they are used as tools to collect, measure, and explore. The installation combines my processes, the tools I developed to examine the Kronstadt landscape, and the artifacts that resulted from this process of exploration.

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Claudia O'Steen

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