2026 SPE Annual Conference: Catalyst for Exchange
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print this pageIn Memory of North
Lightning Round: Clare Benson
Saturday, September 14 - 9:20AM to 9:35AM
ELIF 305
I look out over a rugged Alaskan landscape. The sun is setting, and the side of the mountain is dusted in a warm pink light. There is something in the sky that looks like a daytime moon or a freshly detonated explosive. I know, in actuality, it's only surface damage. Time and weather have aged this old photographic slide, projected so large now it surrounds me. My father was once there, behind or beside the camera, inviting me into his world. I become somehow distantly connected to a landscape I've never experienced or known.
For a decade between the 1960s and 1970s, my father worked as a hunting guide in the Alaskan wilderness; my childhood is embedded with stories and legends of this place.
I will share my latest work, which reflects on, and responds to, a collection of my father's faded and deteriorated images of the Alaskan landscape; a deterioration symbolic of the flexible and fallible nature of memory; a poetic illustration of a "wild" landscape that is itself in a state of rapid change.
In these images, the wild is tamed, decapitated, discolored, like a dystopian record of the results of colonial ideals. This is a space where memory turns to mythology, mythology turns to memory, and aspects of identity are built around fragmented notions of experience and ownership.
This work exists in the form of old and new photographic imagery, as well as a series of letters written between my 86 year old father and me; an exchange that continuously guides this ongoing work, and attempts to recall the memory and meaning of that time and place, almost a lifetime ago.
speaker
Clare Benson
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