"Ice Cave," Christine Rogers
One day in 2016, Christine Rogers received a letter from her mother, sent by a lawyer, cutting off all contact. Rogers was instructed to never reach out to her mother again. “Wherever she is … she is somewhere far away,” Rogers writes. This letter is not included in The Dream Pool, and its absence is felt — a chasm of grief. All that is missing from The Dream Pool feels this way.
But first, we’ll consider all that is present. Showing at Belmont University’s Leu Art Gallery through May 24, The Dream Pool is an exhibition of photographs taken over 15 years, displayed alongside texts from archival newspapers and the artist’s personal narrative. The significant amount of text appears on translucent paper that overlaps with many of the photographs. One wall is so crowded that it looks like the surface of a desk, as if we’re inspecting organized evidence in a complicated investigation.
Rogers, an associate professor of photography at Belmont, centers her research and art on “the use and function of images in our personal and collective lives,” and continually grapples with the greater context of global warming. For The Dream Pool, she has provided us with a central plotline — her mother’s disappearance from her life — and then layered it within history, within dreams and within imagery that appears laden with symbols.
"Laura Resting," Christine Rogers
The distinct chronological arc of The Dream Pool gives us a clear sense of time, and thus its running out. Naturally, it all begins with a dream.
“When I was a child, I had a dream about a mountain,” the text begins, the paper overlapping an unframed photograph of four figures in a snowscape. We assume this must be a mountain’s summit. Nearby is a photo of an ice cave, with polar bears — a mother and her cub — carved into the wall of ice. There is a stroller in the center of the scene. A figure, more like a shadow, appears to be the photographer. There must be a reflection here, but we can’t quite tell where the glass is.
As the text begins in earnest, Rogers writes about how she went to Switzerland to reckon with her mother’s obsession with her family’s origins. Her mother always referred to Switzerland as “heaven on earth,” and when Rogers finds herself atop the mountain of her childhood dream, she encounters an Indian woman who describes the moment in exactly those words: “heaven on earth.” This serendipity, this improbable thread between two women, draws Rogers to India in 2012.
Rogers has returned to India many times since that first trip, and it has been a consistent source of inspiration for her work. She is a two-time Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Scholar for India, in 2012 to 2013 and 2018 to 2019. Her first solo show in India was in 2013 at 1 Shanthi Road Gallery in Bangalore, and she has had artist residencies in both Bangalore and Mumbai. In The Dream Pool, she focuses on her research into the Indo American Ice Trade, a brief period in the mid-1830s when ice was transported from Boston to Calcutta. For the first voyage, the ice was harvested from New England waters that included Walden Pond, loaded aboard a ship called the Tuscany, and hauled around the globe, losing half the ice in the process.
“I like to imagine the ice in the hull of the ship,” Rogers writes, “buried in hay and burlap, shrouded in darkness, like a fetus, like a zygote, like a memory. It’s there, lying dormant … a signal of both wonder and of doom.”
"Plastic House," Christine Rogers
In the most dense section of The Dream Pool, we witness the response and aftermath of this trade. There’s a poem published in the papers (it’s so lavishing of praise that 47 stanzas must be cut), letters arguing for the ice’s merits and dangers, and then discussions about how to distribute the ice to “private families.” Alongside portraits of people she meets in India, Rogers writes about visiting the oldest ice factory in the country and the “snow theme parks that are seemingly in almost every mall.” The aforementioned poem is accompanied by a photograph of an Indian tugboat named the Time Skipper, if anyone was looking for a clear explanation of what Rogers is doing here.
Along the way, we learn about Rogers’ relationship with her mother, their creative collaboration, and her mother’s grappling with the darkest parts of her life. When we finally get to her mother’s letter, we’re tucked into a corner of the gallery. The paper is practically falling off the installation wall. It’s the most devastating part of the story so far, and it’s crowded out. However, there is more pain to come — an utter loss of motherhood for the artist.
The remainder of the gallery is occupied by 11 large photographs. At this point, we are fully contextualized. We can see exactly what’s gone missing — maybe not the specifics, but we can feel the outline of it. In these large-scale portraits, the subjects’ faces are turned away, their curled bodies glowing in light or water. There is a triptych of craggy rocks that appear almost in sequence, as if the sea is eroding them over time. Another triptych captures the sun low over the horizon, obscured in a filmy flare or glare. There are two images of ice blocks resting in sand — water rushing around one, the other resting quietly. These ice photos are hung close to the ground; a child would have the best view of them.
When it becomes necessary to ask what happened, there can be no end to the number of connections that can be made. With the towering perspective offered by The Dream Pool, Rogers suggests that great personal pain and tremendous familial loss are not so different from all these other losses — the forgetting of history, the using-up of our planet. We all desire for our pain to have context; here, Rogers says, is one context.
“No resolution to be found,” she writes of one memory of her mother. “A loss of loss.”
Grief is visitation and revisitation, with stories told and retold, and Rogers has so gently drawn us to her story. The word that comes to mind is correspondence, both in the sense of sending and receiving letters, and in the serendipity of two points in time sharing something in common. Rogers has composed an astonishing visual memoir, soaring in its scope yet seemingly at peace with all that has been withstood.
