Isachsen: Leaning Toward Darkness

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Edmonton artist aAron munson is no stranger to depression. His project, One Hundred Attempts to Make a Film About Depression, reveals an artist finely tuned to the vagaries that can make life seem unbearable. In this – as with his latest project, Isachsen – he is following in his father’s footsteps.

Munson is haunted by the struggles of his father, who, as a 19-year-old, spent a year at the Isachsen weather station on Ellef Ringnes Island in Nunavut. Isachsen has the worst weather in Canada, rating 99 out of 100 on the Climate Severity Index. It’s so far north that you look south to see the Northern Lights. And it’s dark 24 hours a day for three months each winter.

Here, with the wind howling in his ears, his father kept a diary. “I have no ambition to do anything, sleep in fits and starts, don’t give a damn about living,” he wrote in 1975.

Curious about the scar on his father’s psyche, munson visited the abandoned station with a guide in 2016, spending a week shooting photographs and video, and recording a wind so disturbing he wore noise-cancelling headphones to maintain his equilibrium. His stunning backlit photographs form the core of the Isachsen exhibition, on view until Feb. 17 at dc3 Art Projects in Edmonton.

Additional works by Alberta artists Dara Humniski, Gary James Joynes and David Hoffos round out the show into an immersive installation, giving it full power as an extended metaphor for depression.

The collaboration was important for munson, who started using an unusual form of his name years ago to distinguish himself from another artist with the same moniker.

“There is so much more you can do, working with other media,” he says. “So much that you can’t do on film alone.”

Throughout the show, the parka serves as a proxy, a lone everyman. Its hood, which obscures identity as it protects, is meticulously recreated, complete with snaps, grommets and toggles, at seven times its original size by Humniski. To enter the show, you must walk through it.

Joynes’ soundscape includes three wind compositions that interplay which each other. At the entry, he has positioned speakers so sound waves hit the wall, mimicking the thumping blasts of Arctic wind. It’s easy to understand how this alone could drive a person to despair.

A final element of the show is a beguiling diorama of the Isachsen station built by Hoffos. Smoke spirals upward to the night sky as the Northern Lights weave overhead. Below, the buildings glow with a warm light that belies the anxiety of those within.

When Isachsen was decommissioned in 1978, the accoutrements of life – chairs, tables, lamps, even tools and other equipment – were left behind. Snow has blown in through broken windows and deteriorating walls. Flake by flake, it repossesses the space. In one particularly moving photograph, a solitary figure in a parka sits in a snow-plumped armchair in the radio room, the station’s link to the outside world.

As snow insinuates itself into an abandoned building, so too does depression seep into the human psyche. Isachsen is a powerful show that challenges viewers to talk about isolation, loneliness and mental health. Yet for all its bleakness, it is not without hope. A man walks determinedly across the snowscape, sundogs bracket the April sun, and an Arctic fox leaves tracks in the snow. Even leaning toward darkness, there can be solace. ■

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