Corinna Cook

Distance Over Light

Where are we in physical space? asks Yukon painter Jane Isakson. What points of view diverge from mine but also lead here? The artist takes these questions on a journey to Norway’s Svalbard Islands. On high Arctic beaches, she creates installations with string, sticks, and candles, rigging prisms and conduits. The painter pulls thin, taut marks across spare land and sky, searching for a material way to triangulate her physical location. How, the painter asks, can the land tell us where we are? And Where, she asks, do my own reference points diverge from those of others?

Two years later, essayist Corinna Cook circles an art gallery in Yukon Territory, viewing visual work Isakson made upon her return from Svalbard—semi-abstracted landscape paintings that hash out a new metaphysics, a theory of light and rock and spatial convergence, with sightlines to the past, present, and future.

Corinna Cook strings her own lines—connecting the tear-shaped Alaska island where she grew up to the faraway Flint Hills of Kansas, where literature by Indigenous Osage writer William Least Heat-Moon opens the way for citizens to sense the stone underfoot. To help bear the burden of her hometown’s fraught history, Cook gathers these threads and mimics the painter’s methods in language, threading land and memory to study refractions trapped at convergence points.

Uncanny kinships emerge. Between Southeast Alaska fjordlands and the Flint Hills of Kansas, cross-continental histories shift and align. Distant topographies merge. Light falls at a slant. Color cracks open, and the truths of one place render unpredictably in the face of another.

Written as a series of fourteen separately titled companion pieces, this essay in segments moves between literary criticism, art writing, and history to ask: what does such recognition make possible?

Anticipated publication date: Winter 2023