These photographs and drawings reveal and explain the methodology behind The Human-to-Oil Project, including potential sites to house the Project, such as salt canals and extinct waste sites in Wendover, Utah.
Dimensions: Variable.
Materials: Digital prints, matte medium-altered drawings, charcoal pencil drawings.
Blueprints are drawings and diagrams done to inform the processes behind building the work of The Human-to-Oil Project (H20). The digital prints were inspired in part by an artist residency research trip I took to the Center for Land Use Interpretation facilities in Wendover, UT. The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is a non-profit arts organization that strives through community involvement and growth implemented through artistic practice. While at CLUI, I researched and visited multiple hazardous waste recycling facilities and salt factories within the area. This area of Utah is designated as a ‘waste zone,’ so a high concentration of these sorts of factories and institutions are all located within a 25-mile radius of each other. This fact struck me, in regards to my interest in the desert as a non-site, or a place that our country places undesirable products and consequences, without regards to the communities within those areas.
I fictitiously created blueprints and diagrams of these processes occurring, by altering photographs of the waste sites and salt factories in Utah. Salt evaporation ponds at the salt factories,where salt is collected from the evaporation of highly salinated water canals,were turned into evaporation canals where Salt Preservation Skins were being grown. Various waste containers and storage “test cells” where hazardous waste is stored at the waste recycling and storage sites were transformed into illusory locations that harbored the buried Salt Preservation Skins until their contents were needed for energy. Blueprints were drawn and created during my residency at CLUI, to lend a feel of invented “authenticity” to the sculptures and installations.
