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The Arctic panorama has often been framed by conversations of the Victorian imperial imaginary and was originally conceived to showcase anglophone exploration, heroism, and scientific discovery. This paper explores the complementary and multifaceted visual representations of Arctic glacial ice, from the Victorian spectacle of the panorama to contemporary virtual reality technology. I look at how glaciers have been depicted, documented, and presented within panoramic media over the past two centuries. I explore how ice moves through both time and space, confronting climate histories within physical and spatiotemporal ideas of movement. Alongside the materiality of ice, I consider the modes of observation involved in creating and viewing these panoramic pictures. In making Arctic exploratory history tangible and visual, I do not seek to simply revive a sublime imaginary and document ice loss but look to the panorama as a method of engaging polar exploration and scientific discovery in the study of visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the wilderness ideology with which the Group of Seven's coastal landscapes of the north shore of Lake Superior are often associated. Focusing my analysis around key works by Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, I offer an alternative perspective on commonly-adopted national and wilderness narratives, and instead consider these works in line with an emergent ecocritical consciousness. While a conversation about wilderness in relation to the Group of Seven often ignores the colonial history and Indigenous communities that previously inhabited coastal Lake Superior, this paper identifies these within a discussion of the environmental history of the region. That the environment of the north shore of Lake Superior was a primordial space waiting to be discovered and conquered only seeks to ratify the landscape as a colonial space. Instead, by engaging with the ecological complexities and environmental aesthetics of Lake Superior and its surrounding shoreline, I challenge this colonial and ideological construct of the wilderness, accounting for the prevailing fur trade, fishing, and lumber industries that dominated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A discussion of environmental history and landscape painting further allows for a consideration of both the exploitation and the preservation of nature over the course of the twentieth century, and looks beyond the theosophical and mystical in relation to the Group's Lake Superior works. As such, the timeliness of an ecocritical perspective on the Group of Seven's landscapes represents an opportunity to consider how we might recontextualize these paintings in a time of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, while recognizing the people and history to whom this land traditionally belongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the wilderness ideology with which the Group of Seven's coastal landscapes of the north shore of Lake Superior are often associated. Focusing my analysis around key works by Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, I offer an alternative perspective on commonly-adopted national and wilderness narratives, and instead consider these works in line with an emergent ecocritical consciousness. While a conversation about wilderness in relation to the Group of Seven often ignores the colonial history and Indigenous communities that previously inhabited coastal Lake Superior, this paper identifies these within a discussion of the environmental history of the region. That the environment of the north shore of Lake Superior was a primordial space waiting to be discovered and conquered only seeks to ratify the landscape as a colonial space. Instead, by engaging with the ecological complexities and environmental aesthetics of Lake Superior and its surrounding shoreline, I challenge this colonial and ideological construct of the wilderness, accounting for the prevailing fur trade, fishing, and lumber industries that dominated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A discussion of environmental history and landscape painting further allows for a consideration of both the exploitation and the preservation of nature over the course of the twentieth century, and looks beyond the theosophical and mystical in relation to the Group's Lake Superior works. As such, the timeliness of an ecocritical perspective on the Group of Seven's landscapes represents an opportunity to consider how we might recontextualize these paintings in a time of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, while recognizing the people and history to whom this land traditionally belongs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]