“CLUI specializes in this brand of perceptual revelation, in which a previously overlooked site is made not only visible, but also legible as a guide to understanding larger, nationwide systems. In a recent exhibition on the oil fields of Los Angeles, the CLUI documented active derricks camouflaged behind sound-absorbing floral jackets in high-school grounds and artificial drilling islands designed by a Disney theme park engineer and named after dead astronauts; taken as a whole, the system sucks 28 million barrels of crude out from under the city each year. By simply presenting its straight-forward documentary descriptions and photographs of the city’s pumpjacks and well heads, the CLUI is not only inviting us to marvel at the vast and ingenious petrochemical infrastructure our society has built, but also to consider more nuanced ideas: the ways in which the price of a barrel of oil physically reshapes the landscape; the irony that Los Angeles’ crude is too sticky and thick to use for much else than making yet more asphalt; the decision-making apparatus that allows us to simply discard chunks of land as environmental sacrifice zones; and the perceptual adaptation that allows us, for the most part, to ignore oil-field methane vents disguised as bollards in a Ross parking lot.”
