The art gallery at the University of New England in Portland, Maine, was originally constructed in 1977 to house an alum’s collection of Impressionist masterpieces. A stark two-story box of white stone, the structure is lit from above by a large rafter window; the second floor is something of a walkway with an interior balcony that looks down to the single gallery below. The effect is tomb-like, a modernist mausoleum, and I point this out up front because when entering “Circle of the Sun,” an exhibition showcasing works by Justin Levesque, Kathryn McElearney, and Shoshannah White that contemplate the Arctic Circle—I thought: How apt.
Apt because, of course, when one considers the Arctic, they are immediately confronted by its deterioration—headlines like “Arctic warming seen at three times global average in years ahead, UN weather agency says” are constantly shouting at us to do something (anything!) to halt the effects of man-made global warming.1 And still, while it would be easy to translate the sepulchral tone of the architecture to the conceit of the show—“Here lies the remnants of a lost land”—the atmosphere is immediately undercut by a bit of buoyant blue by Levesque, an artist whose data-driven investigations into said color greet one upon arrival. A series of photographs, glyphic graphs, and sculptures collected primarily within a floating-wall half-round, they offer viewers a unique—in the case of Cool-Coded (2025), eleven soft sculpture sigils created from Arctic cooling gel—even hands-on experience of an often out-of-reach realm.
Levesque, like McElearney and White, attended the Arctic Circle Residency and witnessed the rapid acceleration of ice-melt brought on by climate change firsthand. His practice, replete with his wide bold blues and, at times, even glitter, imbues the daunting task of preserving the region with a sense of optimism. The rest of the first floor is reserved for McElearney, whose images and sculptures adorn the perimeter of the room like personal altars. Her work depicts interactions with the landscape that center human interventions, such as the sculpture of a young woman, pants around ankles, squatting to pee. While the sculptures portray lone figures in dynamic poses, her photographs are arranged in frames or confined in ceramic, carefully collaged like the scrapbook of the strangest family you know. The result is sometimes spooky, with a masked individual with an arcing horn, and at other times, tender—a tight shot of interlocking fingers—and always intimate. By training her lens on those inhabiting the terrain, McElearney transmutes an anthropomorphic vulnerability to the environment itself. Take Deep Water (2025) and A Snail Crawling on the Edge of a Straight Razor (2025), two black-and-white photographs hung side-by-side. Ostensibly what we have here is a portrait and a landscape, the former a close-up of a woman’s bare back, chest-high in freezing water, the latter a sharp tip of an iceberg out at sea, but how different are they really? Two bright bodies in dark water at temperatures unfit for survival, one too cold, one much too warm.
Upstairs, White’s remarkable photograms shimmer like astral relics. And while it’s true they have a celestial quality—I could easily be convinced that Coal and Glacier Water Cliché Verre #9 (2019/2025) is a lunar landscape—these monochromatic gelatin silver prints are comprised of materials not of our skies but (as their titles suggest) from deep below the Earth’s surface. To create these pieces, White mixes glacier water from Alaska with coal from Pennsylvania, using analog processes to compose camera-less prints. The result is pure magic, the soot and ice orchestrating a cosmos that we humans have come to expect only when we cast our eyes to far-off domains, be that the nebulas of space or the ecosystems we find under the close lens of a microscope.
Collectively, the show provides various levels of focus that, like concentric rings, take one closer and closer and closer to the fathomless Arctic. From Levesque’s macro perspective mapped out to its correct coordinates, to McElearney’s individual encounters, down to White’s molecular multiverse, “Circle of the Sun” offers views beyond society’s neon sign perpetually blinking “Catastrophe.” The Arctic presents a crisis, yes, but one that we can work to mitigate. At a time when the sheer magnitude of public defeatism prompts us to look away, this show invites us to look more deeply.
1 Poidevin, Olivia Le. “Arctic Warming Seen at Three Times Global Average in Years Ahead, UN Weather Agency Says.” Reuters, May 28, 2025. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/cop/arctic-warming-seen-three-times-global-average-years-ahead-un-weather-agency-2025-05-28/.
“Circle of the Sun” is open through June 8, 2025, at the University of New England Art Gallery on its Portland campus at 716 Stevens Ave, Portland, ME.
