Impression numérique d’archive, 2021
As the polar regions grow increasingly accessible, territories once seen as remote opposites are now drawn together by the geopolitical and capitalist forces of extractivism and the fossil-fuel industry. The colonial ideologies embedded in these landscapes—evident in abandoned whaling stations, military outposts, and explorers’ forts—persist in the present climate crisis. Houston’s composite images juxtapose, invert, and fuse her photographs from the Arctic and Antarctic, creating hybrid terrains that reflect overlapping histories. These visual assemblages reckon with legacies of human domination over species and land, while proposing alternative sovereignties—those of wind, water, and air.
Jessica Houston is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, painting, oral histories, and video to explore climate change, deep time, and geographies of resistance in the polar regions. Since 2008, she has journeyed from pole to pole, collaborating with communities, poets, scientists, and philosophers through her research-based projects.
Her work celebrates the complexity of polar environments while confronting ecological precarity, colonial legacies, and self-organizing natural systems. By foregrounding the interdependence between human and more-than-human worlds, she invites reflection on our shared planetary futures. Houston’s work is held in major public and private collections, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Canada Council Art Bank. Recent exhibitions include … no footprints, even. at Vanderbilt University Museum of Art, Beyond Her Horizons at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, and Ecologies: A Song for Our Planet at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.