CRUDE

"One of the major difficulties faced by any aesthetic encounter with oil is the apparent capacity for the substance to absorb all critique, in much the same way that it absorbs light."

Imre Szeman

No other nation consumes as much oil as the United States, which accounts for more than 20% of global consumption annually while only 4% of the world’s population lives in this country. Although the second and third countries on the list, China and India respectively, are home to more than 35% of the world’s population and almost 9 times more populated than the U.S. together, their oil consumption combined does not reach the level of the States. This oil dependency is one of the biggest contributors to climate change and has detrimental political effects on an international level.

Crude is an installation of film and heliographic prints about the oil dependency of the United States. It is an audiovisual meditation on the paradox of progress and self-destruction inherent to capitalist societies.

In Los Angeles and its vicinity, home to the country's largest urban oil field and refineries, America is being transformed into a bizarre engine, the pacemaker of the passing age of petroleum. The film depicts this urban oil infrastructure as a complex web of constantly working machines.

The heliographs show American cultural elements that are deeply embedded in excessive oil consumption: the world's first drive-throughs, overcrowded parking lots of massive shopping malls, car vending machines, suburbs, and freeways. Coated with bitumen collected from La Brea Tar Pits, prints adapt the earliest photographic technique invented by Nicéphore Niépce to expose Southern California car culture with the raw material that keeps it running.

isikkaya.com

Main Gallery Installation View

Heliographic Prints

Video Stills