This is a fascinating exploration of the artistic response to the oil industry - its history, culture, and impact. Petroleum, in its extraction, distribution, economics, and social, political, and environmental impacts, defines our contemporary world, yet in the developed countries that consume it most, oil remains conspicuously invisible. Taking its title from Pablo Neruda's 1940 poem, Standard Oil Co., this survey of artistic responses to the oil industry from artists around the world offers a spectacular range of ideas. While some artists focus on petroleum's environmental impacts, others choose to respond to its social significance, its modern history, or the awe-inspiring visuals of the industry's infrastructure and detritus.
Works include: masks fashioned from jerry cans and found objects by the Yoruba artist Romuald Hazoume, of Benin; kinetic sculpture based upon the tar sands of northern Alberta by Calgary artist Robyn Moody; lace-like sculptures made from oil drums by New York-based Canadian artist Cal Lane; photographs, drawings, and videos made in Arctic Canada by Vermont artist and farmer Louisa Conrad; documents and drawings by Austrian artist Ernst Logar made in the Scottish oil town of Aberdeen; and a delicately carved jerry can by Vancouver's Brian Jungen. It also includes: a video set in North America's first oil town, Oil City, Pennsylvania, by Ohio artist Robert Ladislas Derr; a large sculpture based on oil drums and advertising by Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham (Rome/Berlin); photographs of the Alberta tar sands by renowned Toronto photographer Edward Burtynsky; drawings and sculpture inspired by the Exxon Valdez disaster by expat Canadian artist Susan Turcot (UK); and a billboard by Saskatoon artist David LaRiviere.