Christina Seely
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LUX
Christina Seely’s series Lux (2005-2010), titled after
the system for measuring illumination, examines the
disconnect between the immense beauty created by
human-made light emanating from the earth’s surface and
the environmental impact of the carbon dioxide produced
by the world’s wealthiest countries, evident in the brightest
areas detected on a satellite map. The three regions most
visible in NASA images are the United States, Western
Europe, and Japan, which together emit approximately
forty-five percent of the world’s CO2 and, along with
China, are the top consumers of electricity. This body of
work focuses on Seely’s imagery of the cities in the United
States: Boston, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles,
and New York. Eventually, Lux will comprise photographs
of the forty-three brightest cities in the world, but the
project is less about the individual locations than their
effective interchangeability and the global ramifications
of consumption. Reflecting this, each photograph is titled
simply Metropolis, accompanied by a notation of the city’s
latitude and longitude. Seely’s photographs explore the
realities of dealing with the infrastructure of these urban
environments and their excessive energy consumption,
but she consciously takes an indirect approach to the
subject. “I am interested in the dialectic between the
surface documentation of the photograph and the complex
reality that lies beneath the surface,” she explains, “how
beauty can suggest the simple and ideal while both subtly
reflecting and obscuring a darker more complicated truth.”
BIOGRAPHY
Christina Seely is a photographer and professor based in the San
Francisco Bay area. Her work has been exhibited nationally and
internationally and is a part of many private and public collections
including: The West Collection, Oaks, Pennsylvania; Walker Art
Center, Minneapolis; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut;
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and The
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. She
received her B.A. from Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota
(1998) and her M.F.A. in photography from Rhode Island School
of Design, Providence (2003). Seely is a member of the faculty
of the California College of the Arts in Oakland/San Francisco in
the photography department. She is also a principal member
of Civil Twilight, a design collective whose Lunar Resonant
Streetlights (streetlights that dim and brighten in correlation
with the moon phases) won Metropolis Magazine’s, 2007
“Next Generation Design Competition”.