New York City-based artist Jeri Coppola, who has been spending time in Inverness County

for more than 30 years, will exhibit “Between Now and Now”, a solo show, running from August 11

to September 8. The show will feature a variety of different media exploring the concept of

memory while reflecting the deep influence of the Cape Breton landscape on Coppola’s

extraordinary and surprising work.

Dark Arctic

a show of artists from The Arctic Circle Residency, 2023

Longyearbyen, International Territory of Svalbard—We came from all over to meet on the top of

the world. To spend time in the sparse, unrelenting landscape of which all of us had been

dreaming: embarking on a residency on a ship that took us out of internet and cell service (and

perhaps reality) and pushed us in ways none of us could have imagined.

Beauty and danger, endless horizons, space and ice. Using sound, drawing, photography and text

we are all trying to relay what we witnessed. The landscape is enormous, and it is impossible not

to be moved by what climate change is doing to it. While the high Arctic of 80ºN is not exactly a

liminal space, it does have desolate and abandoned locations that evoke an unsettling,

melancholic, and sometimes surreal atmosphere. We visited scientific research stations, some in

use seasonally, others abandoned completely, as well as the active research site at Ny-Ålesand.

Our thoughts turn to historical trips and the difficulty in navigating the terrain.

We are a group of artists and writers seeking to celebrate (and perhaps memorialize) who we

are/will be/were as a species interacting with its environment. People are capable of creating

such beauty—of such radical acts of kindness and compassion and joy—but also of enacting such

terrible things on one another and our planet. What burden do we, as artists, carry in this regard?

The science of the environmental and climate crises is clear, of course. But—we ultimately

propose—it is the role of artists to communicate what the environment means. What does the

climate crisis mean? How can we make resonant the stories of humans' relationship to the natural

environment? How do we communicate the exigency, the action, and the fierce urgency of what

is needed at this moment and in this crucible?

Witnessing matters, and so does representation. They matter especially for artists, who shape

public discourse, thought, and ideas before any theorists, academics, or politicians and industry

leaders. Art is the first driver of imagination, of unthought possibilities; and here, with our species

facing existential collapse, artists have a responsibility to not only enter the conversation, but to

drive it toward the creation of new ideas and new ways of being. It is our most important

question, and it is the right one.