Wolfcamp Catalogue

The Wolfcamp Shale of West Texas is the most lucrative oil field in the world. “Wolfcamp Catalogue” questions the myths that power the technological and political structures of oil and gas. Images become visual signifiers cueing our subterranean desires.

The Wolfcamp Shale of West Texas is the most lucrative oil field in the world. “Wolfcamp Catalogue” questions the myths that power the technological and post-colonial structures of oil and gas. Images become visual signifiers cueing our subterranean desires.

Employing a structuralist method, I move away from the crafted traditional narrative of one-male’s heroic journey of discovering oil. Instead, the "Catalogue" engages images and texts running the gamut of historical photographs, roadside snapshots, and visual data used by geoscientists. In this way, I also present an inquiry into the photographic medium—in particular, its archivable, amassable and distributable nature—as much as a dig into our sub-conscious.

I also include in my submission a related body of work. "The CaribBasin Recipe Cards" bring together two separate and contrasting geographical regions, inquiry into the medium of photography, and a joy of cooking, all in a series of recipe cards. With these cards, I activate a space that connects Caribbean presence with the oil fields of the Permian Basin of Texas. The cards are designed as a boxed set of four-by-six-inch printed and archivable photographic cards. This work incorporates geology, displacement, extraction, coloniality, and sometimes gastronomy. The cards adopt an archipelagic structure in that each single card works alone as an island, yet the series of cards resemble the more open geoform of an archipelago. As an island would become a signifier in an archipelago, a recipe card acts as a signifier within the card collection. History tells us that a photograph’s ability to deliver beauty was overlooked in favor of the medium’s documentative function. The instructions in the CaribBasin cards parody the tone of didactic instructions as they critique the two regions. Further, as objects with gendered connotations, recipe cards seemed apt for depicting the traumas of displacement. Serving as domestic documents, recipe cards often act like an index to one’s personal history as they are passed around, willed to the next generation. Can anyone cook anything from these “recipe” cards? Probably not. But one can make associations between the Caribbean and the Permian Basin of Texas, between production and consumption, and between past and present.

All recipe cards:

4x6 in, archival pigment print on paper, 2022-2023

For more on this project, see:

“The CarbBasin Recipe Cards,” Nourish and Resist: Food and Transatlantic Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art, Editors: Leslie Wolff (Assistant Professor of Art History, Florida State Univ.) Hannah Ryan (Assistant Professor of Art History, St. Olaf College), Yale University Press