The earth has been surveyed; the age of colonial exploration is over. And now, in wealthy Western nations, most everyone is an amateur explorer. We travel the world. We read about distant places and times and people. We trek into our own interiors, following the leads of psychologists and geneticists.

Sigrid Sandström questions what all the exploration is for. In the title series of her show, Ginnungagap, she made 24 paintings of the exact same spot in a remote, icy landscape, hung together around one room. They vary in medium and in size, from five inches to five feet. The gouaches on white paper capture the opaqueness of a snowdrift; the acrylics on translucent Mylar and glossier plastic are sleek and reflective, like paintings seen from under various depths of ice. Also, thanks to changes in the shadows, shifts in perspective, and sketch lines like tracks in the snow, no two paintings are alike, shutting down the hope for a definitive view. To make matters worse, a 16-millimeter film playing in the same room on a collapsible screen—like a family slide show—projects all the paintings in the span of a second, so each is seen for 1/24th of a second, on a loop. We are aware of being tourists in "Ginnungagap," the Norse primordial void between the lands of fire and ice where the world was born.

Landscape paintings once glorified the terrifying aspects of land—the "sublime"—in order to bring the awesomeness indoors, where viewers could experience craggy peaks or Niagara Falls at a safe, pleasurable remove. Now, Niagara Falls is a tourist's amiable afternoon outing and even the sky is traversable. "Previously the sublime was a possibility," Sandström told Frye Art Museum curator Robin Held in an interview. "Now it needs to be invented." Not that she intends to reinvent it. By operating between the drama of the landscape and the redundancy of repeating it, Sandström balances the titillation of foreignness with the longing to belong. She spurs desire through representation, just as travel pamphlets and real-estate fliers dangle the promise of a place, both its exoticism and its hospitality, in visual terms. But Sandström is advertising desire itself—and forcing viewers to experience its frustrating dissatisfaction. What the show lacks in pleasure it withholds intentionally. This is the antithesis of a new sublime.

Sandström is plainly fascinated and repelled by human beings planting flags of ownership in hostile environments. In one of her videos, a man skis onto a snowy landscape, a blip of black in a sea of white, and plants a flag. Then he returns and removes the flag. Repeat. In another video, the camera remains steady while a buoy with a flag on it drifts in a strong wind until it is offscreen entirely. What a funny fantasy it is to plant a flag in water! With the sounds of the whipping wind and the calls of the birds, Sandström brings her viewers to the surface of the place but no further, then she slowly disappears the visual landmark, the point of purchase.

Sandström painted an entire scroll of paper in detailed wood grain, then hung it on the wall upright, like a tree. It looks just like wood, but it isn't wood. Then again, it is wood—in paper form. Likewise, her paintings and videos are representations of exploration. When a man plants a flag, he imagines that his ownership radiates outward from his hand like a nuclear blast, touching what has become his. But he does not make a home here. Sandström suggests that ownership is a poor substitute for knowledge—and that representing an object or a place in art is like staking a claim in inhospitable land.

Actually, there is one shelter in the show, awarded by Sandström to a man who refused to knit his ego to his discoveries. It is flimsy, but that seems appropriate. Hargrave's Commitment: No Rights Reserved is a floor installation named after Lawrence Hargrave, an Australian inventor who didn't patent his inventions, preferring to share them. A few, such as the box kite, became instrumental in developing airplanes. The show's catalog calls the box kite on the floor of the gallery a sadly grounded object, but the kite also indicates a journey that has reached its destination. Chocolate bars and canned foods are stacked inside, for survival. But the two main elements are a small portrait of wood grain under glass, and a small video projection of a man trying repeatedly to plant a flag in frozen ground. This is a stopping place between the dream of a built home and the drive to abandon it.

jgraves@thestranger.com