Brooklyn-based video and performance artist and photographer Janet Biggs‘ new exhibition was launched Oct. 3 at the Montreal Musée d’art contemporain, as part of the ongoing Montréal/Brooklyn multi-gallery exposition. The exhibit includes three videos from Biggs’ The Arctic Trilogy, as well as her most recent piece, A Step on the Sun (2012).
Biggs’ work explores extremes, especially of intense physicality and environmental limitations, which necessarily accords it an existential dimension. Her Arctic Trilogy chronicles an exploratory journey near Svalland (north of Norway). Fade to White, one part of the trilogy, shows the super-duper handsome Arctic explorer Audun Tholfson kayaking, and these images are spliced with seemingly ageless and androgynous countertenor John Kelly singing a Baroque aria, highlighting the limits of masculinity as ever more far-flung parts of the world become mapped and tamed, as well as showing the ends of the earth and solitary figures who scrappily inhabit them.
Cult MTL talked to Janet Biggs about danger, extreme weather and how to make those into art.
