“In the autumn of 2015 I traveled to the arctic, to the scenes of airships and sledging parties, ice floes and glaciers. In the past men came there to push back the shade of Terra Incognita from the maps of mankind and they stayed there as ghosts, as myths. My father read to me as I grew up, crashing onto my bed and using my stuffed animals as makeshift pillows. Together we read their stories, the heroes who braved the ice and snow, the men who died frozen and cold. But when I arrived to the top of our planet what I found was not glittering expanses of ice and blue melt ponds, the strong feel of the men of legend; instead I found tundra, green and gold in the low autumn sun, black brown rock from ancient tropical oceans and women with rifles. I want to show these women at work, show the northern ecosystem they protect and work within and, combining it with the threads I began weaving in my graduate thesis, bring the present arctic into conversation with the past expeditions there.”

Katherine Akey is an artist based in Washington, DC. She uses a wide variety of film formats and photographic techniques to address adventure, the human spirit and the turn of the century and its many cultural upheavals. She graduated from the International Center of Photography at Bard’s MFA program in 2014 after completing her BA in Psycholinguistics at NYU in 2011. Her work has been exhibited across the United States and was recently a participant in the Arctic Circle Residency, Autumn 2015.