In 1903, Anthony Fiala, a newspaper cartoonist and photographer from Brooklyn, N.Y., sailed to the Franz Josef Land islands in the Arctic Ocean with 38 men, 30 ponies and 218 dogs as part of the "Ziegler Polar Expedition."
Fiala prepared for the journey with the newest and finest materials available: a Bioscope 35mm motion picture camera, instant coffee tablets, powdered eggs, the toughest Siberian ponies and the strongest hickory wood sleds.
But the crew's ship was crushed by ice, marooning those aboard and leading them to camp and make three attempts to reach the North Pole with dog-and-pony sleds.
Flashforward more than a century later and an artistic installation inside The McIninch Art Gallery at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester conjures a melting glacier, and reveals a long-ago expedition's overconfidence and ultimate failure to reach their icy goal.
The display is part of a print installation by Heddi Vaughan Siebel, granddaughter of an assistant surgeon on the Ziegler Expedition, John Colin Vaughan. Siebel began her own quest, to retrieve crew's story, in 1998 with a Fulbright Grant to retrace the expedition's steps and paint the landscape as far north as 79 degrees north latitude.
"Lumber, Coal, Fawn Skins: An Exploration Revealed in Lists" opens today, Jan. 21, at SNHU, with a reception set for 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28, in Robert Frost Hall (snow date Feb. 4) on campus. In conjunction with the exhibit, a panel discussion, "Our Transforming Relationship with The Arctic," will be held Thursday, Feb. 4, at 5:30 p.m. (snow date Feb. 11).
"Softly illuminated screens taut with hand-pulled prints on translucent paper form a mysterious visual narrative," curators said. "Outside the gallery, five digitally restored reproductions of archival photography by the expedition's commander and photographer, Anthony Fiala, tell another story."
Siebel is an adjunct professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and has also taught at Wellesley College, the Massachusetts College of Art and Harvard University, all in Massachusetts.
She earned a masters of fine arts degree from Yale University in New Haven, Conn., and a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass.; the Boston Public Library; and the Yale Art Gallery in Connecticut.
The McIninch Art Gallery at SNHU is open Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Thursdays from 5 to 8 p.m. All gallery events are free and open to the public. This showing will run through Saturday, Feb. 27. For more details, call 629-4622.
