Mary Edna Fraser, American
Gulf Oil Spill, 2010
This piece is a bird’s eye view of oil-covered waters and seems to convey the deceptive beauty and insidious normalization of such opalescence. The blue water is overtaken with green, and the pink-orange-red of corexit, with which BP attempted to sweep the spill under the rug. The dark green and dark red are likely swirls of oil on water in a literal sense, but their abstraction evokes oil-covered animals struggling in water or faces under stark lighting and heavy shadow. The off-white objects floating on the water could be feathers, or plastics, bringing the petro-pollution full circle. What is most striking is the naturalism and normality: this could be any bird’s eye view of a landscape- the green could be vegetation, the orange and red clay, but the abstraction that obscures animals and faces also obscures any normal landform. In that way, this piece can be contextualized in continuing climate crisis art, as climate change will turn land into liquid and fills the ocean with runoff from the land. Label by Frank Kennedy