“Syncrude Storage Tanks and Infrastructure (fig. 3.1) illustrates what Cariou calls “petrography.” Notably, this reproduction does not capture how Cariou’s petrographs react to different luminosity; the image becomes more or less visible as one changes its angle of exposure to light. Viewers of these images can often see their own reflections in a petrograph as well. Jon Gordon ascribes a disruptive quality to the reflection in the petrograph: “The way we see ourselves through the bitumen of a petrograph, one’s own face reflected in the images, is a way of showing the viewers their implication in the process of development that the images depict. This disrupts the typical effect of photo-realist representation in which the viewer assumes the image shows a ‘reality’ out there, distant from and possessed by the viewer.” For Cariou, the process of making petrographs was a way of becoming more explicitly aware of ubiquitous petrocultural toxicity. While he, like many people, was aware of the many toxic consequences of a culture in which oil extraction, refining, and consumption are pervasive, it was not until he began working with bitumen as an artistic medium that he “became more viscerally aware of the risk” posed by the material. Contrary to expectation, Cariou’s encounter with bitumen as an artistic medium made the substance more ambiguous to him; he considered the role capitalist modernity played in transforming this naturally occurring substance into something toxic and part of the climate change catastrophe. Cariou compares bitumen to the history of tobacco, “which has a sacred spiritual value for many Indigenous people, but when transformed in the machinery of capitalist modernity, it becomes a harmful, toxic, addictive substance.” How, asks Cariou, can we “establish a different relationship with [bitumen], one that is more respectful of its power for destruction as well as its potential for creation”?”
Excerpt From: Michael Truscello. “Infrastructural Brutalism”.
Warren Cariou, “Petrograph Gallery”
