Christine Rogers: The Dream Pool

Christine Rogers: The Dream Pool by Linda AlterwitzSeptember 12, 2024

Christine Rogers is an artist and educator based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her series The Dream Pool is about climate change woven together with a very personal story about motherhood. In a non-linear narrative, she spans elements of her life, family, cultural history, and environmental challenges, exploring deep feelings of loss.

In a poetic interpretation, Rogers explores dissolution. By combining the personal story of her family’s history (a sudden departure from their Swiss homeland and a more current loss of her relationship with her mother) with a larger historical thread, she searches for connections, correspondences and encounters across time and space, across nations, across families and strangers, across the warming sea.

Rogers began researching ice harvesting in 2014 after learning about the ice trade between New England and Calcutta in the 1830s. From 2005-2011 she lived in Boston and swam at Walden Pond every day in the summers. When she learned about the history where ice was harvested from Waldon Pond and shipped to Calcutta, she became excited to learn more. She traveled to India and spent time at the archives in the National Library of Calcutta to begin her research about the history of the ice trade.

I asked her what drew her to begin research on this topic. She responded, “I had been working on another body of work about tourist attractions in India that market to tourists as the Switzerland of India. After nine months there, I began to notice a general draw of cold, ice and snow for the domestic tourists I met in these various hill stations across India. I share a similar draw to snow and ice as a southerner. I once spent the month of January in Vermont doing a residency and it changed my life to be in such an ice-cold environment.

In conversation, Rogers offered additional insight into this body of work. “Photography believes that it can capture so much, that it can record so much, but often times it fails. It becomes a surface for projection—the materials collapse or fade. Sometimes there are things that can’t be photographed or were not photographed. I’m interested in what can be recorded photographically but I’m also interested in all the photographs that photographers didn’t or couldn’t take—those spaces in between.”

The Dream Pool is comprised of 15 years of photographic work and archival newspaper texts from 1833-1835 that are intertwined with a personal narrative. The images were made in three countries – Switzerland, the United States and India. The content and story line span two centuries, while the personal narrative spans several generations.

In 1833, ice was harvested from Walden Pond and a few other ponds in New England, placed on a ship called the Tuscany, and sent to Calcutta by ice entrepreneur Frederic Tudor. Upon departure, there were 400,000 pounds of ice on the ship; when it arrived in Calcutta, September of 1833, only roughly half that remained. No one in Calcutta had ever seen anything like it. Calcuttans wrote poems about the ice to the local newspaper: poems about relief to the feeling of their brains on fire and of cold wine and ice cream. Some, upon touching the ice, felt like their hands were burning and ran.

In June of 2014, I first went to Calcutta to search for mentions of the ice trade in the National Library newspaper archives and to photograph blocks of ice melting outside of the oldest ice factory in India.

In Nashville, one hot summer day in 2016, my mother, who I had always been close with, suddenly ended our relationship by email under mysterious circumstances, turning my life and my work about the ice trade on its head.

The Dream Pool weaves the poetic memory of the almost-evaporated history that was once the Indo-American Ice Trade of 1833 with the present day of my family’s story, beginning with an enduring rupture over the departure from their idealized Swiss homeland and the ultimate dissolution of a family. Finding connections between global and regional aspirations, personal narrative, and within the relevant context of an ever-warming planet, I am resuscitating memories that highlight the optimism and limits of photographic seeing. It feels a bit like going out into the sun with a sunburn.

What results is a story about melting ice, lost and imagined homelands, disappearing mothers and the fading dream of motherhood.

This project was generously supported by two Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholarships.

03_Christine_Rogers_6ice plexi lensscratch

Christine Rogers is an artist from Nashville, Tennessee. She earned her BA in Anthropology from Oberlin College in 2004 and her MFA in Studio Art/Photography from Tufts University in 2008. She has exhibited widely across the United States and was in a two-person show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile, in the fall of 2012 and at MoCA Tucson in 2018.

She is a two-time Fulbright Nehru Senior Research Scholar for India (2012-2013 and 2018-2019) and a recipient of several Metro Arts Nashville grants. Her first solo show in India was in the spring of 2013 at 1 Shanthi Road Gallery in Bangalore, Karnataka and she has since shown again in Mumbai in group shows at Clark House Initiative, Project 88, and Chemould Prescott. Her research and teaching has been centered around art in the context of global warming, cultural perceptions of landscape and vernacular photography, rediscovered archives, personal narrative, and the use and function of images in our personal and collective lives.

She has had artist residencies at Vermont Studio Center, 1 Shanthi Road in Bangalore, Clark House Initiative in Mumbai and was a Learning Lab Artist in Residence through Metro Arts. Her work has been written about in Time Out Bengaluru, The Bangalore Mirror, The Hindu, New Landscape Photography, The Juggernaut Magazine, Dazed Digital, Burnaway Magazine, The Tennessean, and The Nashville Scene. She has spoken widely on her work and research at The American Center with the US Consulate General Kolkata, the Fulbright Conference in Kochi, the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta, as well as various conferences Universities in the United States. She is an Associate Professor of Photography at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.