Exercises in Being Close to You

Exercises for Being Close to You: A Story for the Arctic Refuge is an experimental documentary that follows a group of hikers through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. They hope to meet up with the Porcupine Caribou herd to collect stories that could help push back on oil exploration and drilling on the caribou’s birthing grounds. The narrator, admitting to a perverse desire to be close to everything, wants nothing more than to spoon a caribou.

As the film culminates in anticipation of the “money shot”, the audience must evaluate their expectations of nature films. Meanwhile, the expedition team is left to weigh intention with strategy when environmental filmmaking mirrors tactics of the extraction economy they are fighting against.

The film uses documentary footage of the two-week expedition intercut with experimental vignettes — exercises to rethink our relationship to the land and animals we hope to protect.


*This video is part of a body of work pictured in the exhibition images below. Additional works in video, sound, porcelain, caribou hide, antler, glass glitter, wood, gold leaf.