Tristan Duke draws on insights from both art and science to capture images of a planet on the brink. Recognized for his innovations in photography, video, and experimental media, Duke makes frequent use of visual technologies of his own invention. The exhibition is the first to present the artist’s ongoing Glacial Optics project, exploring our current moment of climate precarity by engaging glacial ice as an artistic medium and collaborator.

The exhibition centers on a series of large-scale photographs of Arctic landscapes, made with a lens the artist fashioned from the ice of the region’s glaciers. Duke describes how, as early indicators of global warming, glaciers loom large in the collective unconscious. Here the artist employs this charged material to transcend photography’s role as a document, making works that contemplate our intertwined existence with a rapidly changing environment.

The project began in the spring of 2022, when Duke embarked on an Arctic expedition with an unusual goal: to locate ice clear enough to shape into a functioning camera lens. The resulting portraits of glaciers—focused through their own ice—were recorded on giant negatives, using a deployable tent camera.

Since returning from the Arctic, Duke has continued to harness the poetic and diagnostic potential of glacial ice. In one recent body of work, he trained his ice lenses on the effects of wildfires across the American West. Though nothing would seem further from the frigid landscapes where the project began, in the context of the climate crisis—where human impacts drive massive drought—the connection is clear: as glaciers melt, wildfires rage.

In 2023–24, through residencies and projects with several leading laboratories, Duke turned his attention to the scientists who look for answers in glacier ice. Paleoclimatologists reconstruct detailed climate histories spanning hundreds of thousands of years using ice core samples, while astrophysicists hunt for elusive “ghost particles” deep within the glacier beneath the South Pole. Drawing on these findings, Duke reveals surprising narratives encoded in Earth's ice.

Duke’s melding of conceptual and material approaches expands the purview of photography, positioning it as a formal, social, and environmental practice. Fusing medium and message, Duke invites viewers to contemplate the “gaze of the glacier,” the effects of drought, the passage of time, and what endures.

THANK YOU

Support for Glacial Optics is generously provided by SITE SANTA FE Board of Directors; SITE SANTA FE Exhibitions Fund; Christophe A. Olson Roebling Endowment & Josed Granados; McCune Foundation; City of Santa Fe Arts and Culture Department and the 1% Lodgers Tax New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs; and the National Endowment of the Arts.

Works in this exhibition were made possible by the LACMA Art and Technology Lab Grant and the Open Bay Foundations Arctic Circle Residency. Additional support from the Epicurious Fund, as well as Jasiu Krajewski and Matthew Palevsky of the MEP Foundation.

Special thanks to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the Exploratorium, the National Science Foundation, Byrd Polar Climate Research Center, and the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center.