Oona Stern

Beta Test 2024:

Testing of updated UI for Iceline.

Stay tuned for updates on the next pop-up demo event.

Grant Award Fall 2022:

The Puffin Foundation has provided generous support for the continued development of Iceline.

Stay tuned for updates on the next pop-up demo event.

https://oonastern.com/video

Ice is the beginning, and ice is the end of Antarctica. Stephen Pyne

The exhibition Adequate Earth presents the Antarctic works of the founding members of the Collective. It reflects the variety and breadth of artistic practices and concepts that found realization and support within the AAWP. Bringing these works into a virtual showroom and presenting them side by side, storylines emerge. Similar to a physical exhibition, Adequate Earth offers several layers of content and context.

Baselines, 2009/2020

Visual artist Oona Stern, who spent five weeks at Palmer Station on Anvers Island, used a small sketchbook to capture the geologic and ecologic features in the environment surrounding the station. Her series Baselines shows that she is less interested in creating true-to-nature documents than in analyzing the formal qualities of the features she noticed. A common perceptual practice, the distinction between figure and ground, gets lost in the open landscape of Antarctica. By employing minimal graphic marks to capture large icebergs floating in proximity to Anvers Island as well as small cryoconite holes in the horizontal surface of a glacier, Stern trains her eyes to look for discernible patterns and elements. Quite literally, she sharpens her focus for a closer “reading” of the Antarctic landscape.

Ulrike Heine

On-Line Exhibition:

Adequate Earth - Artists and Writers in Antarctica
January 28 - May 22, 2021
Curated by Ulrike Heine

www.aawcollective.com/adequate-earth-exhibition

The Antarctic Artists and Writers Collective (AAWC) is a newly-established not-for-profit creative collaborative.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) founded the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program (AAWP) in the early 1980s. Since then, over 120 artists, performers and writers have gone to Antarctica, using their talents to tell the story of the continent though art, music, writing and performance. AAWC brings these creators together to share their work - past, present and future - with the public at large. With that purpose, the AAWC furthers the mission of the AAWP: to enable serious writings and the arts that increase understanding of the Antarctic and help document America's antarctic heritage.

The AAWC Mission: 
To inspire and educate the public about Antarctica and its scientific exploration through collaborations in the arts.

AAWC goals:
1.  To create a network of past and present participants from the AAWP.
2.  To create a series of traveling and modular exhibits for public display.
3.  To create a modular lecture series for university and conference talks.
4.  To create an archival website documenting the program's creators and their output.
5.  To explore other means to document the history of AAWP through books, documentaries, conferences.
6.  To find grant funding and sponsorship to bring these stories to the public's attention.
7.  To create a network for future collaborations between members.
8.  To create a way to exhibit the history of AAWP in Antarctica itself.

Antarctic Artists and Writers Collective:

Website launch, winter 2020

aawcollective.com

The New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) hosted Oona Stern at the annual ReMake the Holidays festival.
Over 150 visitors joined the open studio and workshop to discuss the art and science of glaciers, polar environments, climate change, and to preview content for Iceline, an interactive video installation which presents the phenomenon of melting glaciers, and the increasing likelihood of sea-level rise.

Greatful appreciation to all the earnest participants; to Liz Slagus and Erin Thelen of Public Programs, and to the Explainers - Angelisa, Fafa, and Ruth - at NYSCI; to Bryan Day and Katrin van Dam; to Cheryl Leonard.
Special thanks to Elaine Hood and Karen Shafer.

Iceline is a collaboration between visual artist Oona Stern, and composer Cheryl Leonard. It is the latest piece in the "Adfreeze" series - a set of multidisciplinary installations, combining sound, video, instruments, sculpture, drawing, and photography: each piece is a portrait of a site in the Svalbard archipelago north of the Arctic Circle.  "Adfreeze" is fiscally sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts, a 501(c)(3) organization.

NYSCI was founded at the 1964–65 World’s Fair and has evolved into New York’s center for interactive science, serving a half million students, teachers, and families each year, offering informal, hands-on learning through various products and services that use the “design-make-play” method of bringing delight and play to educating science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). ReMake the Holidays is a response to increased consumption and waste during the holiday season and an attempt to give people inspiration and options to do things differently while having fun.

Workshop and pop-up studio:

New York Hall of Science
ReMake the Holidays
December 27 - 30, 2019

nysci.org/event/remake-the-holidays/2019-12-27

Print sale: Atlas Spring Market

Newburgh NY
May 11 - 12, 2019

Web shop now open!

Performance news:

Augustana Teaching Museum of Art
Rock Island, Ilinois
January 11, 2017

NYSCA award in Film & Media / New Technology Production 2016

Iceline
The latest in the Adfreeze Project series, "Iceline" is an interactive and immersive installation which provides a portal into the sonic and visual details of the chaotic, beautiful, environment of the Arctic Ocean. The audience joins floating glacial ice in a participatory journey at the boundary between above and below water.

Adfreeze Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between visual artist Oona Stern and composer Cheryl Leonard that investigates the Spitsbergen region of the Arctic.

Previously on view: brick 

Governor's Island, NY
aiop: Art in Odd Places, The Artifacts 
Colonel's Row, Building 403
September 13 - 28, 2014
artinoddplaces.org

Previously on view: bus stop

South Orange, NJ
IN-SITE: The Intersection of Art and Architecture
September 21 - October 19, 2014
pierrofoundation.org

Currently on line: Ice Notes

At Length Magazine
atlengthmag.com/art/ice-notes 

This collection of writing, photography, sound, and drawing offers a glimpse of the remote Arctic, as well as a window into the working process and work-in-progress of Adfreeze Project, an ongoing collaboration between composer Cheryl Leonard and visual artist Oona Stern

Honors for photography: 

Winner - Crevasse 
Highly Commended - Gentoo Trail 

Our Antarctica, Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, Open Science Conference. 

Portland, OR, 2012
Christchurch, New Zealand, 2014 

Previously on view: meander

Huntington NY (Long Island)
Ellwood Park
June 2012 - June 2013

Bellevue WA (Seattle)
Downtown Park
July - October 2012