Christina Seely: Lux
Co-curated with Justine Topfer. San Francsico Arts Commission Galleries: City Hall. January 2010 - February 2011
Lux features large-scale photographic banners by San Francisco-based artist Christina Seely, installed in the North Light Court as part of the Art at City Hall program. The banners depict cities within the brightest regions on NASA’s map of the Earth at night, transforming luminous urban landscapes into meditations on light pollution, overconsumption of resources, and the broader impact of human activity on the planet. Seely’s images are simultaneously beautiful and haunting, revealing the tension between visual splendor and the environmental consequences it conceals.
Drawing from both artistic and environmental perspectives, Seely emphasizes the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. In Lux, she explores the dialectic between surface appearances and deeper realities, inviting viewers to reflect on how beauty can both reveal and obscure pressing ecological concerns. The exhibition encourages contemplation of sustainability, energy consumption, and the delicate balance between human ambition and the planet’s fragile resources.
This exhibition is supported by the San Francisco Arts Commission & the Public Utilities Commission.
About Christina Seely
Christina Seely’s practice investigates humanity’s precarious relationship to the non-human living world, drawing on nearly two decades of immersive, field-based collaboration with climate scientists in some of the planet’s most ecologically vulnerable regions. Her work challenges the perceptual limits of photographic and time-based media, using these constraints as metaphors for human perception, and reframes how we situate ourselves within the accelerating realities of climate collapse. Through immersive, affective works, Seely bridges the human and non-human realms, foregrounding the emotional terrain of ecological loss and inspiring new forms of presencing and resilience in response to planetary precarity.
Seely’s work has been featured in major exhibitions including Next of Kin: Seeing Extinction Through an Artist’s Lens at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (2017) and Dissonance and Disturbance at the Anchorage Museum (2021). She has received numerous prestigious awards, including a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2024–25 US/UK Fulbright Scholarship, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and an Environmental Humanities Fellowship from the University of Edinburgh. Her work is held in public and private collections worldwide, and she has participated in residencies at MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, Light Work, the Arctic Circle Program, and Dora Maar House. Seely holds a BA from Carleton College, an MFA in Photography from RISD, and a self-designed Master’s in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and she currently lives and works between Edinburgh and Northern California.