Meta, 2020
6 back-lit transparencies, 24” x 36” x 2″ each.
Installation detail, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
The six back lit panels in Meta each contain an image of cupped hands cradling a mound of earth. The gesture is ambiguous—either an offering or an indictment. Upon closer inspection, the soil appears caked, heavy, and viscous. The images have been culled from the online catalogues of stock photography companies, and are in fact of bitumen, the sticky, oil-saturated substance found in tar sands deposits, held up for the camera by workers in various Canadian oil sands facilities. The collection of words below the images are suggestive of metadata tags, keywords attached to digital files that allow them to be identified in database search results. Unlike conventional image tags, the words in the artwork stray from the technical and the disinterested, carving out a space for context, candour, and reproach. The profound physical devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction can be a remote abstraction, situated at a geographical remove and further obscured by corporate image management. Meta plays with a parallel between the extraction of fossil materials and the way that information and awareness is buried and excavated in a digital realm.
Exhibition history
Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020, curated by Leila Timmins.
Installation detail, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Installation view, Terra Economicus, Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, Canada, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
Meta, 2020. Panel #2. Back-lit transparency, 24” x 36” x 2″.
Meta, 2020. Panel #3. Back-lit transparency, 24” x 36” x 2″.
Meta, 2020. Panel #4. Back-lit transparency, 24” x 36” x 2″.
Meta, 2020. Panel #5. Back-lit transparency, 24” x 36” x 2″.
Meta, 2020. Panel #6. Back-lit transparency, 24” x 36” x 2″.