MARGET
LONG
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
MARGET
Mathew Brady’s Skylight
Artist Books
Hunting Blinds
Nature Valley
Film + Video
Crocker Land, 2014
Installation View, "Oblique Strategies," Peter Fingesten Gallery, February, 2014
[Optical Wallpaper, framed pigment photographic prints, refractive plexiglass, each 16 x 20 inches. Crocker Land expedition map and text, edition of 200 pigment prints on rag paper. Available to viewers.]
In 1906, Commander Robert Peary reported seeing a glimmering landmass from the far northern shores of Arctic Canada. He claimed it as a new continent, named it Crocker Land after one of his benefactors, and marked it on the map. Seven years later, the American Museum of Natural History and the American Geographical Society funded a follow-up expedition to, in the words of its leader, “solve the world’s last geographical question.”
On closer inspection, Crocker Land turned out to be a mirage.
Long’s work examines the photographic afterlife of this failed, five-year expedition. In 2013, they visited the American Museum of Natural History to search for a photograph of the Crocker Land mirage. If the illusion that misled Peary’s team had been recorded, what might that photograph look like?
The museum’s Crocker Land Expedition Field Photographs contain nearly 5,500 images. Long looked at every one. There is no photograph of the mirage.
They were searching for a non-existent photograph of a non-existent place. The absence, they realized, reveals the archive itself as a refraction—an image bent through the desires that fueled the expedition: the drive for discovery, for dominion, and for proof. The mirage that gave rise to this archive continues to refract knowledge in the wake of its own disappearance.
The installation features a photograph of an iceberg from the Crocker Land Expedition Field Photographs, used at the time as a stand-in for the mythical continent in museum publications. Presented beneath refractive plexiglass, the iceberg appears and disappears as viewers move around it.
A wall-mounted Crocker Land map, reproduced as a handout, shows the supposed continent as a faint, banana-shaped sliver in the Arctic Sea. Found among the Crocker Land Expedition Papers at the American Museum of Natural History, the map’s reverse carries a text reflecting on what is lost and found in an archive born from a mirage.