Christina Seely

Christina Seely’s photographs connect to science, design, and architecture, capturing the relationship between the natural and industrial worlds. She received her BA at Carlton College in Minnesota and her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design. Her art has been widely recognized and shown in multiple exhibitions, including a solo exhibition in 2015 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. In 2014 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship for her series titled Lux.

Lux illuminates the connection between artificial light and beauty and how light is manifested on earth’s surface. Using NASA maps, Seely identified 45 of the most brightly lit cities in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan and visited them to make her own recordings of their particular glow. Named after a unit used to measure illumination, Lux very clearly identifies the economic and political hot spots on the planet, comparing their staggering glare to whole countries and continents that lie in almost total darkness. While Seely includes city names and longitudinal and latitudinal degrees in her titles, each title also includes the term metropolis, establishing the body of work as less about individual places and more about their global impact on the planet’s shared ecology and limited resources. Seeley’s work Metropolis 35° 10’N 136° 50’E (Nagoya), 2005–2008, was included in Lannan’s 2016 exhibition (Infra) Structure.