Selena Kimball
Ice-blink
September 10—October 17, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 6—8 pm
Selena Kimball, Aurora, 2026 (detail)
First-edition illustration from Arctic Explorations (Kane, 1856), adhesive, iodine.
Ulterior Gallery is pleased to present ice-blink, Selena Kimball’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, opening September 10, with a reception from 6 to 8 pm. The artist will be present at the reception.
Selena Kimball’s work begins with a small act of destruction: cutting into an intact printed image. The material images she uses range from the rare to the everyday, from engravings in a first edition to yesterday's newspaper. In cutting, reassembling and touching these histories, Kimball works with the residue of a physical trace—a quavering line, a deep shadow, and a solid dot—left by whoever recorded the image before her.
The works on view are built from thousands individual engravings cut from first editions of Elisha Kent Kane’s Arctic Explorations, published in 1856. The paper has outlasted the geography the book depicts: The engraver is long dead, and the ice he drew has long since melted.
The Arctic Kane's expedition recorded was already an image before it was a place. When the Franklin expedition disappeared in 1846—two ships, 129 men, swallowed by the ice—the popular belief in Britain and America was that the crew had found safety in a tropical sea at the top of the world. Scientists called it the Open Polar Sea. It was marked on explorers' maps as fact. The very edge of Kane's map is blank, except for those three words.
Blank spaces on the map have always been sites of projection—of desire, of domination, of hope. As Americans settlers pushed west across the continent, they often carried two books: the Bible, and Arctic Explorations, the most widely read illustrated account of the Arctic at the time. The book was printed near the end of a centuries-long practice of making paper from the discarded clothing of industrial workers, a method produced usually durable cotton and linen rag paper.
The Arctic ice pack is now approaching the Open Polar Sea once described as myth. Cutting into the historical material lets Kimball layer the evidence of her own hands over someone else’s recording. When the collages were complete, she poured gallons of iodine into a trough and lowered each piece into the dark liquid. Sections came unglued and drooped. Iodice deosn’t heal paper—it stains it, permanently, in act of trying. The gesture is about attending to the surface even when there is nothing left to heal.
Selena Kimball (b. 1973, Bangor, ME): Kimball received her M.F.A. from Hunter College in combined media in 2007, following a B.F.A. in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 1997, and currently works and is based in New York and Maine. Her projects develop from a historical text she investigates through translations into collage, painting, sculpture and installation. An avid researcher and a writer, Kimball has co-published several books and articles, and collaborates with anthropologist Alyssa Grossman across book projects, film, and experimental research in a contemporary form of Surrealist ethnography. Her first solo show with Ulterior Gallery, Ghosts in, in 2023, was reviewed in BOMB Magazine, and her work has been exhibited at: Shirley Fiterman Art Center at BMCC, New York, NY (2026); Wolfstaedter Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany (2018, solo); Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME (2015); the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY (2013); the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (2011); the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2004, solo); and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest (2001). Her work has been reviewed in The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and Frankfurter Allgemeine, among others. Kimball is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, Rauchenberg Foundation Archive Research Resident (2025), a NYSCA/NYFA fellow (2020), a MacDowell Fellow (2026, 2017, 2011), a recipient of two Pollock-Krasner awards (2021, 2015), a Jerome Foundation grant (2015), and an Asian Cultural Council award (2018). Kimball’s works will also be included in the upcoming group exhibition at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, opening in October, 2026.