Wolfcamp Catalogue
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Dates2021 - Ongoing
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Author
- Locations Texas, Odessa
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Recognition
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Recognition
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 Permian Basin stretches across 86,000 square miles of desert in west Texas and eastern New Mexico. Far below this vast emptiness lies the site of my ongoing photographic project—the Wolfcamp Shale—the world’s most lucrative oil producing formation. With an anthropological eye, my project brings into focus the rise of the American nationalism, the colonial history of oil extraction, deal-makings, labor relations, post-colonial ripples, and the prehistoric geology of the carbon bearing Wolfcamp Shale. My square box frames, taking photographs every three miles across U.S. Interstate I-20, and the utilization of playwriting, are examples of the structuralist approach I use to reshape this unflinching universe, conspicuously imperial as it is vulnerably human.
