Rachel Rozanski

Rachel Rozanski’s Saskatoon exhibition, Perma, explores an aspect of the climate crisis that’s poorly understood by many – the rapid disappearance of the northern permafrost. She deftly pulls together dramatic images of toppling trees, crumbling land and homes teetering above the ocean to help clarify the emerging crisis. The result is a dizzying and sublime. 

Rozanski is intimate with her subject. She has explored climate change in the Arctic with scientists from Yukon University in Whitehorse and did an artist residency at the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture, a community organization in Dawson City. She also spent time with Indigenous land-based researchers along the northern stretch of the Dempster Highway and has met with climate scientists in Iceland. 

Information about climate change in the North is abundant, but as often occurs with environmental issues, long-term implications get lost in the pressing immediacy of the daily news cycle. Sometimes an issue with a visually appealing centrepiece, like the impact of ice loss on northern mammals, does get coverage, though.

“The dominant image of what’s happening in the Arctic is the polar bear,” says Rozanski. “But there is so much more going on.”

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Rachel Rozanski, “Perma,” 2021

still from two-channel video, 18 min. (courtesy of the artist)

Her work, on view at PAVED Arts until Feb. 25, offers a deeper perspective by exploring a less picturesque but equally vital part of the Arctic. Permafrost is land that has remained continuously frozen for at least two years. In fact, much permafrost has remained below zero for millenniums. It is composed of soil, sand and rock held together by ice. Roads, communities and entire ecosystems exist on top of it. Roughly half of Canada’s land mass is permafrost, she says, and warmer temperatures mean it’s melting 70 years sooner than predicted.

“The entire town of Tuktoyaktuk needs to be relocated,” says Rozanski, who has an MFA in documentary media from Ryerson University in Toronto. “Houses are falling into the sea.” 

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Rachel Rozanski, “Core Samples,” 2020

contact images on LED light pan, in lightbox, 27” x 78” (courtesy the artist)

Rozanski takes gallery visitors through the crisis one step at a time. The exhibition’s still images, presented in light boxes, introduce permafrost. One series, Core Samples, shows seven specimens of permafrost in one large light box. Rozanski, using samples provided by researchers, captured the images using a portable scanner she constructed. The resulting images are reminiscent of rock formations, but the edges are blurred – the ice was starting to melt as it sat on the scanner. Unlike soil samples, permafrost is highly unstable.

“I had to work very quickly with the samples,” she says. “We had to get them back into the freezer as soon as the scans were done. I only had one shot.”

She created a second series using the same process, this time with samples from a mine near Dawson City.

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Rachel Rozanski, “Perma,” 2021

two-channel video, 18 min., installation at Paved Art, Saskatoon (courtesy of the gallery)

Rozanski’s two-channel video, Perma, plays nearby. Here, she uses sound and image to full effect, weaving a riveting narrative of pending disaster. The 18-minute work, which alternates between closeups and wider shots of the landscape, is broken into several movements. We witness destruction on the tundra, in the forest, at the shoreline and in the places where people live. 

Early on, the camera points down, moving over terrain lush with mosses. Birds sing. The scene is interrupted by rivulets of melting water that carve up the land. The audio is dominated by dripping water. The point of view shifts to the horizon, panning over large expanses of conifers. The foreground is sheared away: Roots are exposed and the freshly turned soil seems soggy and lifeless. Trees lean precariously. Next, comes another closeup – a rusty pipe emerges from the soil. On the second screen, a rainbow slick glimmers on a puddle’s surface. We follow the pipe, which carries water from a mine, until it drains into the ocean. 

Here, the camera’s eye meets the shoreline, revealing how the ocean has chewed away the thawing bank. We see animal bones, bits of wood, chunks of twisted metal and black plastic sheeting. The camera pans up to someone’s home, which hangs perilously out over the shore’s edge. It may well be pulled into the water during the next storm. 

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Rachel Rozanski, “Perma,” 2021

still from two-channel video, 18 min. (courtesy of the artist)

Finally, the video shows the floor of a massive sinkhole, where the verdant green of spring clashes with tangled roots and toppled trees. There is no denouement. The video loop begins anew with the ominous sound of dripping water.

The video moves quickly and features dense imagery: form parallels content. The problem is complex, urgent and inextricably linked to global realities. Rozanski’s images foretell the massive loss of infrastructure, the destruction of unique ecosystems, and the forced relocation of communities. 

But a scanner and a camera cannot capture the whole story, and I wish some form of didactic text had accompanied the exhibition. Permafrost contains nearly half of all the organic carbon stored within the planet’s soil. If it continues to thaw, enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and methane will be released into the atmosphere, further intensifying climate change. 

Prior to seeing Rozanski’s exhibition, I was unaware of the magnitude of this problem. This is one reason work like this is so important. While statistics can fall on deaf ears, artistic responses help us feel, in our bones and in our guts, what the coming climate emergency really means. ■

Rachel Rozanski, Perma, at PAVED Arts in Saskatoon from Jan. 21 to Feb. 25, 2022.

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