Parallel Play: Experiments in Picturing the Arctic

UC Irvine Art Professor Jesse Colin Jackson presents a film installation and colloquium with anthropologist Lindsay Bell, exploring northern life through art and ethnography

The UC Irvine Department of Anthropology, Center for Ethnography, and EcoGovLab will host Parallel Play: Experiments in Picturing the Arctic, a colloquium and film installation that brings together artist Jesse Colin Jackson, associate dean of research and innovation at UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts, and Lindsay Bell, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Western Ontario.

Through a decade-long collaboration, Jackson and Bell investigate how art and anthropology can operate in parallel to represent the circumpolar world as complex, layered, and evolving. Their work resists familiar portrayals of the Arctic as either fragile wilderness or untapped frontier, instead revealing it as a lived environment shaped by both resilience and precarity.

The program begins with a visit to Mackenzie Place, Jackson’s multi-channel film installation, followed by a colloquium discussion between the two collaborators. The installation — derived from nearly one million still images captured over five years — centers on a 17-story residential tower in Hay River (Xátł’odehchee), Northwest Territories, known locally as “the High Rise.”

“Mackenzie Place links our careers and communities, returning us to Hay River even as our work takes us elsewhere,” said Jesse Colin Jackson, associate dean of research and innovation. “Through the voices of High Rise residents reading from Lindsay Bell’s book Under Pressure, the film reflects the realities of northern life — how people live within the structures shaped by development and move with resilience and adaptation.”

Bell’s fieldwork and Jackson’s architectural lens converge to “picture the North” in new ways, drawing attention to the intersections of human experience, environment and built form.

“When art and anthropology collide, something unexpected happens,” said Lindsay Bell, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto. “Through Mackenzie Place, Jesse and I found new ways to picture the North — not as distant or static, but as a living place full of complexity, contradiction, and human connection.”

Parallel Play: Experiments in Picturing the Arctic will take place at UC Irvine on Wednesday, Oct. 29, from 3-5 p.m., beginning in the third floor lobby of the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway building and continue into room 3323 on the same floor.

The Mackenzie Place film installation will remain on view Oct. 29 – Nov. 5, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., in third floor lobby of the Social & Behavioral Sciences Gateway building.

This installation is a preview of Jackson's forthcoming installation at the 2025 annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association in New Orleans this November.

For more information about Mackenzie Place, visit here. To learn more about Jesse Colin Jackson, visit his UC Irvine Department of Art bio page here. To learn more about Lindsay Bell, visit her Western University Department of Anthropology bio page here.