PETROLIA

In 2011, I was invited by the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery to participate in an artist-in-residence project while they closed their doors in preparation to move into a new space. This residency consisted of a number of visits to the Sarnia area in order to develop a collaborative research idea with writer/artist Lee Rodney from the University of Windsor, the Sarnia artist-run collective for arts, science and music (SARCASM), and then curator Lisa Daniels. I developed a way of fostering community engagement with the gallery through GPS technology. Members of the community were encouraged to borrow a GPS and take a walk, bike or drive around the county. They could write a short story about their selected location, as well as attach digital images. This information was sent back to me in Montreal. In this way, the community helped to direct my artistic practice by taking me on virtual tours of their favoured locations. It was through this process that I began to explore the relationship between Lambton County’s 19th century oil heritage and the state of the petrochemical industry today.

Petrolia presents coexisting themes regarding the decommissioning or scaling-back of petrochemical processing in the local industrial sector, while simultaneously investigating the pastoral landscape and small-scale, family-operated oil industries of Lambton County. Large format photographs present views from the periphery of Chemical Valley - a dense social landscape where First Nations ceremonial sites, abandoned industry and environmental responsibility initiatives all converge. Other images introduce the ancient oil fields that have been operated by the same families for many generations. In a time when the petroleum industry is the subject of intense political debate, my perspective looks toward the human-scale extraction of crude, and provides a phenomenological excavation of this complex landscape.

Taking its title from a 1927 Upton Sinclair novel, the single channel video Oil!, brings the viewer on a journey through the jerker line system, developed in the 1860s and still used today to draw crude oil from the wells. What begins as an ambiguous sculpture in motion is eventually revealed as a form of Rube Goldberg machine performing the straightforward task of extracting petroleum. The equipment runs day and night, throughout summer and winter.