I have a habit of symbolizing almost everything, a side effect, I think, of my need for all things to have meaning. When I first sat with Elizabeth Alley’s artist statement, I began pulling at her words, reaching into their definitions in search for symbolic meaning. A poem arrived before anything else could:
Feels like Earth but not
My altered state
Unable to recognize
Baffled by Time
Baffled by Place
A total loss of bearings
Its beauty cracks
It is nature change
An aggressive refusal to be known
What happens when Beauty becomes uncertain?
What makes Place real?
What is Earth?
Then I tried to write about the paintings formally, and something kept redirecting me.
I tried multiple approaches: analysis, environmental context, the technical choices Alley made in her materials and composition. All of it was true. And yet the more closely I looked at how she made these paintings, the more I heard an inside direction asking: yes, the technical approach is indeed masterful, but how does that approach take you to a place you may never go? How does her mastery allow you to hear her concerns? The work itself kept asking for something more. The only YES I could find was poetic: write about how it makes you feel. Write about where it lets you go.
This is what Alley’s technical mastery quietly accomplishes. It moves you past the painted surface and into experience. You cannot think your way there. You have to feel your way in. And the only way to feel art is to be WITH the art. Come. Stand in front of these paintings. Let them take you somewhere.
It isn’t the lesser thing, to feel. This part of the world, remote, endangered, indifferent to our understanding of it, doesn’t need our analysis. It needs our love. It needs us to grieve what is being lost before we have fully understood what it is. Most of us will never stand on sea ice, never feel the particular silence of the Arctic, never be held by that cold and ancient light. That is the truth of it. And what Alley’s work does, quietly and generously, is close that distance. It gifts us the ability to fall in love with a place we will most likely never go (it took Alley a determined four years to get there), a place that is changing faster than we can comprehend, a place that needs us to care about it anyway.
That is not a small thing. That is everything.
I keep circling back to ice.
We are speaking about frozen water. There is no land at the North Pole, only sea ice floating atop the ocean. Nothing solid. Nothing permanent. Just freeze and thaw, a rhythm that has held for millennia. Until now. When I picture this, I feel myself floating too: weightless, carried by cold air, my senses dulled yet heightened by unfamiliarity. I know floating. I know the disorientation of being held up by something you cannot fully trust.
And that is precisely the fragility Alley is asking us to witness. The ice cap is not metaphor. It is mechanism. It regulates temperature, reflects light back into the atmosphere, cradles ecosystems we will never see. It is doing the quiet, enormous work of keeping the Earth habitable. And it is disappearing. What floats today may not float tomorrow. What holds today may be gone by the time our children need it to hold them.
This is not abstract. This is the ground giving way.
What happens when Beauty becomes uncertain?
What makes Place real?
What is Earth?
These questions don’t resolve. They open. They ask us to sit inside uncertainty and find that uncertainty itself has something to teach us. The disorientation Alley invites us into is not distress; it is attention. It is intimacy with the unknown. When we lose our footing, we begin to feel what we had been too comfortable to notice. This is what a masterful painter gifts us. She takes us where we ourselves are unable to imagine.
The Shape of Ice (The Good Kind of Ice), oil on canvas, 2026
Plushie Glaciers, installation view; image by Chip Pankey
Upstairs gallery, installation view; image by Chip Pankey
Feels like earth but not spans both galleries at ShapeShifter. The lower gallery holds work from Alley’s Arctic expedition (2025); the upper, pieces from Newfoundland (2023). Downstairs, the atmosphere arrives before the paintings do: cool, quiet, dim. The shades are drawn, the lighting subdued. A video of portholes and water crashing against the hull of her ship sets the mood: we are passengers now, unmoored, looking out at something vast and indifferent and beautiful.
In her painting titled The Shape of Ice (The Good Kind of Ice), Alley repeats a glacial landscape three times horizontally, pressing the relationship between water and light through a palette of cool, analogous blues. A large white shape dominates, a top-down view of a glacier, or perhaps the entire ice cap on one particular day. It is pressed and “sewn down” with a three-looped line, two colors, dashed lines over the top: a seam, a suture, the place where something has been held together and may not hold.
The edges are left unstretched, wavy and uneven, mimicking the boundary where water meets solidity, where certainty dissolves into flux. At the center of that great white shape: transparency. The background shows through, just barely. Fragility made visible. Impermanence given over to form.
This is what it feels like to look at something beautiful that is also disappearing. The ice holds the light. The light passes through. And we are left to ask, quietly and urgently, what we are willing to do to keep it here.
Upstairs
The ascent to the upper gallery is its own experience.
With each step, something shifts. The air changes. The light opens. And suddenly there is land, recognizable land. Buildings. Horizon lines that feel familiar. The textures of commerce, of human settlement, of a landscape that looks like somewhere you may have been before. Newfoundland. The earth beneath your feet again.
I couldn’t help but feel the weight of that return.
Because here is what the journey through these two galleries makes visible: we have placed the Arctic into our collective shadowlands. In the Jungian sense, the shadow, that deep interior place where we push what we cannot face, what we do not know how to hold, what frightens us with its enormity. We don’t want to address the ice. We don’t know how to relate to it. It belongs to a world so remote, so inhuman in scale, so quietly catastrophic in its death-state, that we do the only thing we know how to do with what overwhelms us.
We push it down. Down. Down. And try to forget.
But the shadow does not disappear. It waits. It grows heavier with everything we add to it. And eventually, in the way that all suppressed things do, it demands recognition.
That is what this ascent asks of us. We have walked through the cold and the dark and the floating. We have felt the ground give way. And now, standing in the warmth and familiarity of the upper gallery, surrounded by signs of human life, we are asked the hardest question of all: will we carry what we felt downstairs back into our lives? Will we let it change us?
The Arctic is not gone yet. It is asking. It is waiting. It wants to be seen.