Guided Tour of “In the Wake” Photography Exhibit by Senior Justin Falcone: March 11

The National Fellowships Program is pleased to sponsor Truman Scholar Justin Falcone’s narrated tour of his exhibit In the Wake: Rising Seas, Vanishing Nations. In the Wake photographically represents the places that stand to be imminently altered and eventually erased by anthropogenic climate change in the South Pacific.

Capturing human-environmental interactions in an area of the world historically sculptured by them in a visually arresting manner, In the Wake follows Justin’s voyage in the sail path of Gauguin and Cook from Tahiti to the Marquesas, onwards to the Line and Phoenix Islands in Kiribati, and finally to Hawai’i. Cognizant of anachronistic images that painted Polynesia as Paradise, popularized by Gauguin himself and perpetuated still today on the backs of postcards and magazines, In the Wake frames its focus far off the tourist trail. It is Justin’s attempt to make Kiribati, a nation already omitted from many maps, and a locale projected to lose its land area entirely to rising seas by 2050, reappear.

In the Wake posits again the questions that Gauguin named the most fundamental — “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” — in the face of a forthcoming wave of environmentally motivated migration.

Please join us for the tour, which will take place in Gallery Q of MSE Library on Wednesday, March 11 at 4pm. For more information on the exhibit, click here for a HUB article and click here for the exhibit’s website.