Petrologic

Petro-Logic / Machine Intimacy, Leicester Gallery, 28/29 June 2023: This one-day symposium and exhibition brings together a range of artists, curators and academics to explore the cultural representations, frustrations and fascinations of petroleum and its machines. As we witness global wildfires, exceptional heatwaves and droughts, situating petroleum’s global dominance as an energy source as a recent historical phenomenon is politically important, allowing us to imagine a petroleum-free future. To understand how embedded such cultural understandings are, we need to work through our petro-addictions and its affect. Works in the exhibition represent, copy, mimic or mime the car and/or car related objects, not as a luxury items, but as a deformed, fragile and problematised objects; others look at the conflicted narratives around energy and petroleum regimes as anachronistic, neo-colonist and embodied. The panels and keynotes contributing to the symposium range from cultural analysis of art, film and literature that mines petro-totality, to specific research into the history and resistance to fossil fuel regimes.  

Isabella’s work Nothing Gold Can Stay (2009), shot on location in Santa Paula, the early film capital of the world, considers the role of California’s natural assets in the state’s involvement in the military-industrial-entertainment complex.