THE FRICTION COEFFICIENT OF ICE AGAINST VARIOUS MATERIALS

SPACE is pleased to present, The Friction Coefficient of Ice Against Various Materials, a new window installation by Portland-based artist, Justin Levesque. The Friction Coefficient of Ice Against Various Materials responds to Levesque’s participation in The Arctic Circle artist residency and is a product of an interdisciplinary practice.

Images of the Arctic Ocean, glaciers, icebergs and blue ice are printed on transparent film and presented both as originally captured and warped through digital intervention. The printed films are draped, folded, cut and then heat-treated. The result is a form that is neither a photograph or a sculpture; a place between an image and an object. This work considers the materiality and tradition of formal photography in relationship to Arctic image consumption, new consumer technologies, image-culture, objects in space, and systems.

Justin Levesque is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Portland, Maine. He received his BFA in Photography from the University of Southern Maine in 2010. Levesque is a Maine Arts Commission Artist Project Grant recipient (2015, 2017), and in 2015, was selected as one of thirteen emerging photographers under 30 in Maine by Maine Media Workshops + College’s PhoPa Gallery. Levesque has exhibited throughout New England and nationally at Midwest Center for Photography in Wichita, KS; Terrault Contemporary in Baltimore, MD; and JanKossen Contemporary in New York City.

In 2015, he created an independent artist residency aboard an Eimskip container ship sailing from Maine to Iceland. In 2016 Levesque then installed a public art intervention in a shipping container about his residency with support from The Kindling Fund, an Andy Warhol Regional Regranting Program administered by Space Gallery.

In response to his work about Maine’s emerging relationship to the North Atlantic and Arctic, he was invited to be a fellow of The Arctic Circle artist residency in Svalbard, just 10 degrees from the North Pole, in June 2017.

Follow Justin on Instagram @onedynamicsystem