Hannah Perrine Mode’s “Remote Sensing,” on display at Northeastern University’s Gallery 360, combines Mode’s educational work in geoscience and climate research with her impassioned multi-media art. Through the solo exhibition featuring cyanotype prints, collections of field notes and installations of rope and found objects, the urban Boston audience is familiarized with glaciers, primarily the alpine glaciers of Alaska, and their role in the environment. The exhibition includes an interactive element where visitors can listen to the recorded sounds of glaciers in motion and explore with cartography.
The core of the installation is water — deep and transitional blues displayed through archival film photographs and cyanotypes. And on a larger conceptual level, the water within our human bodies — a whopping 60% on average — connects us directly to these glacial structures and even in the technical processes of the art, i.e. photography, cyanotypes, energy. Whether working directly in the Alaskan terrain or residing in the “deglacieted” land that is now New England, a moment in time and water that is captured by Mode and realized in the viewer’s memory.
The process of the work, which Mode reflects on as a meditative one, captures the terrain as it is in a particular moment of time, as they move around their present environment with the cyanotype fabric. These moments and the essence of the show’s title is described in the artist’s book and interview with organizers Juliana Rowen Barton and Anna Nasi: “‘Remote sensing’ is what it sounds like: it’s a way to see and understand something from a distance without being there. In glaciology, there are two kinds of remote sensing: passive remote sensing uses satellite imagery to observe glaciers from above and has deep roots in photography; active remote sensing uses radar or sonar to send signals down into the ice to generate data about the glacier and what may be underneath the ice.