No other nation consumes as much oil as the United States, which accounts for more than 20% of global consumption annually. The hunger for this resource has poisoned landmasses around the world and has defined the nation's politics for decades. In Los Angeles and its vicinity, home to the country's largest urban oil field and refineries, America is being transformed into a bizarre engine, the pacemaker of the passing age of petroleum.

Işık Kaya is a lens-based media artist whose practice explores the ways in which humans shape the contemporary landscape. She focuses on traces of economic infrastructures to examine politics in built environments and how humanity’s dominance over nature finds its manifestation in everyday architecture. In her work, she erases the physical distance between existing structures and creates dense compilations of industrial fragments to construct new landscapes that look both alien and familiar at the same time. By framing her subjects exclusively at night, she aims to accentuate the artificial and uncanny qualities of urban environments.

Notes

1 Işık Kaya, Thomas Georg Blank, Crude Aesthetics, 2021, Video, 10:15 min.