Susan Turcot "Exxon Valdez's offspring"
5.11. - 18.12.2010
5.11. - 18.12.2010
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» deutsche version
In her new exhibition at my gallery, the Canadian-born artist Susan Turcot presents a six-part series of large-format charcoal drawings.
For quite a while, Turcot has been dedicated to the economies of natural resources that are approaching a crisis and influencing political processes throughout the world. She has done so in various regions of the earth, employing an increasingly differentiated working method vacillating between reportage-like and more symbolic procedures.
After having dealt with other fossil resources, in her new works she now concentrates on the factual and metaphoric features of mineral oil as a source of energy.
With “Exxon-Valdéz” in the title of the show, referring to the oil-tanker accident off the coast of Alaska in 1989, she not only responds to current events – the not yet assessable, fatal environmental damage caused by a leaking oil rig of the BP company – she also calls to mind the continuity of environmental disasters, the dynamism and irreversibility of which can no longer be effectively coped with using conventional political instruments.
» deutsche version
In her new exhibition at my gallery, the Canadian-born artist Susan Turcot presents a six-part series of large-format charcoal drawings.
For quite a while, Turcot has been dedicated to the economies of natural resources that are approaching a crisis and influencing political processes throughout the world. She has done so in various regions of the earth, employing an increasingly differentiated working method vacillating between reportage-like and more symbolic procedures.
After having dealt with other fossil resources, in her new works she now concentrates on the factual and metaphoric features of mineral oil as a source of energy.
With “Exxon-Valdéz” in the title of the show, referring to the oil-tanker accident off the coast of Alaska in 1989, she not only responds to current events – the not yet assessable, fatal environmental damage caused by a leaking oil rig of the BP company – she also calls to mind the continuity of environmental disasters, the dynamism and irreversibility of which can no longer be effectively coped with using conventional political instruments.
The landscape-format drawings not only display an aesthetic of the oil spill as it has lately been created in the news media – they also conjure the endless extensions, crossings, support constructions, and volumes of transcontinental oil pipelines as an extremely vulnerable system of arteries that, in an age of allegedly more open borders but also increasing security risks, dictates new territorialities that in the end can no longer be legitimised by state claims to power.
The fact that Turcot uses the fossil resource of charcoal for her drawings refers back to an existing practice of reflecting on her own artistic means, in which the issue is no longer just an explanatory presentation of conditions, but also makes reference with great urgency to the closed nature and fragility of natural resource cycles.