Molly Dierks. Parts, 2010; car parts, paint, metal and wood bases; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

In her installation Parts (2010), Dierks erects three metal objects with evocative but nonspecific shapes and details. Painted a warm coral hue like lipstick or rouge, the forms suggest sections of mass-produced, utilitarian objects. Strangely feminized by their shapes and color, they appear like hybrids of car parts and pantyhose, fenders and legs. But what is strangest about them is how surprisingly natural it feels to a viewer to see both a car door and lipstick in the same object. Parts goes beyond a mere feminizing of typically masculine objects—the maligned “shrink it and pink it” ethos applied to marketing products to women. The congruity of these readings reveals a deeper entanglement between them, of seeing the production of a concept of a woman in the production of a car.

Molly Dierks. Parts, 2010 (detail); car parts, paint, metal and wood bases; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

The artist intensifies this entangled reading through her Hardbodies series (2012), in which the chromed and car-paint-dipped sculptures look like lipstick, pills, hair curlers, or vibrators. This linkage suggests not only that the ideation of woman is a cultural production, but also that industrial modes are required to effect it—that it’s not just the curled hair, the colored lips, or the Prozac smiles that produce the Stepford Wife aesthetic of normative femininity, but also the factories, machines, and electronics that make the objects that produce the curls and the colors. The end result, Dierks suggests, is like the attractively bright and unyielding Hardbodies. The shaped mirrors under these objects possess a seminal quality: They reflect the image of the sculpture, a commodity produced to reflect heteronormative male desire.

Molly Dierks. Hardbodies, 2012; wood, automotive paint, lathed aluminum, mirrors; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Dierks’s Test Tube Babies (2016), meanwhile, appear to be failures or byproducts, the tailings of feminine production. These silvery, molten masses are squished, pitted, and burned, like ingots subjected to forces much greater than they can bear. They are also peppered with incongruously girlish details: pastel blotches like gobs of melted candy, tubing like a half-dead glow-stick bracelet, a pink plastic bag like a bubblegum balloon, sparkling rhinestones. They seem to be the tortured remnants of the ore of femininity, the raw material from which the commodified female is crafted.

Molly Dierks. Test Tube Babies, 2016; cast aluminum, paint, resin, urethane found objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

But whereas Parts and Hardbodies explore a relationship between the production of femininity and industrial goods, Test Tube Babies offers a way out of this bleak vision. The Test Tube Babies works do not evoke a sense of completion, unlike the sleek forms of the earlier works. Instead, they are abject and grotesque, a rejection of easy modes of consumption. As test forms for normative femininity, they may be failures, but as failures they express the possibility of liminal positions within industrial manufacturing, either of ideas or objects. For those seeking a path away from classification and gender essentialism, the Test Tube Babies offer a template—one less recognizable and perhaps more appropriate—for modes of being and becoming.

Molly Dierks. Test Tube Babies, 2016; cast aluminum, paint, resin, urethane found objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Molly Valentine Dierks received a BA in behavioral psychology from Dartmouth College, a post-baccalaureate degree in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in art and design from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She has participated in exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her work has been included in exhibitions by such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. She is currently an assistant professor of fine arts at Tarleton State University, and she lives and works in Texas.

Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

In The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, the viewer is transported to a landscape filled with objects made unfamiliar. A parasol protrudes from a wall, spinning with a hypnotic rhythm; a single blonde hair extension is attached to a tensor bandage held by a white mannequin hand; a room divider has been outfitted with pungent dried fish that hang from the screen’s top rung; a basket is retrofitted as a lamp. Adding to this dynamic effect, reams of colorful wrapping paper are pasted from floor to ceiling on the gallery’s east wall, and the west wall is covered in garish tablecloths. Throughout the gallery, sagging cardboard boxes that read “Product of China” act as supports for many bizarre and beautiful things.

221A is primarily concerned with the impact of design on lived experience. This exhibition highlights the high cost of low prices by showcasing products that make the trip from China to Chinatowns all over the world. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store addresses the way in which low-cost production strategies are enjoyed by the West and endured by the East, and the impact on laborers that is often obscured by the abundance of cheap items available in trinket shops in the city’s east end.[1]

Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

The objects in the exhibition are tagged with prices, inflated only slightly from the price point we’ve come to expect—though they are low by fine art standards. The prices include the value of the original materials and the artist’s labor. Tran has transformed the gallery into a domain for both economic and social exchange, creating a snapshot of modern life influenced by mass production and mass culture.

The gallery is located in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and by sourcing products exclusively from this part of the city the exhibition also comments on the changing face of the neighborhood. This historical community, once almost exclusively inhabited by immigrant families, has witnessed an expected but swift wave of gentrification. An uneasiness haunts the changing blocks as galleries, condos, and trendy minimalist restaurants move in.[2] Vancouver’s Chinatown is also flanked by a site populated by drug-users and drifters. The area is considered Canada’s poorest postal code, yet so far the communities are working together to revitalize abandoned spaces and empty storefronts.

Ron Tran. The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store, 2015; installation view, 221A, Vancouver. Courtesy of the artist and 221A. Photo: Dennis Ha.

At 221A, The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store is the inventory of a shopkeeper gone mad, driven to insanity by the senselessness of consumption. Artificial flowers beautify the ugly reality that defines the gallery’s location. Baby harnesses are filled not with babies but with fake plants. A periwinkle fan spins slowly, acting as the lower half of an armless mannequin’s abdomen, whose eye peeks through a sun visor. It is perhaps not important what is for sale, as long as the impulse to buy is intensified and subverted, displacing the use value of the object and replacing it instead with pure aesthetics. A fruit-print tablecloth is wrapped tightly around stretcher bars to make a canvas, elevated to high art yet rendered unusable.

Ron Tran: The Kitchen Garden at Home/Store is on view at 221A in Vancouver through May 23, 2015.

[1] For more information about workers’ rights violations in China, visit chinalaborwatch.org, a New York-based organization that documents unfair treatment by international companies in Chinese factories. Also, for an example of factory violations in exchange for cheaper production read: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/05/workers-rights-flouted-apple-iphone-plant.

[2]For varying responses to the changing face of Vancouver’s Chinatown see, http://www.vancouversun.com/touch/news/metro/Battle+Chinatown/10384991/story.html?rel=10403843 and http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/behind-the-changing-face-of-vancouvers-chinatown/article7282156/

Edward Burtynsky. Alberta Oil Sands #6 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007. Courtesy of the Artist.

It’s often impossible to fully understand the big picture of industrialized development from the limited perspective of the consumer. Each day, most of us in the western world go about our business, driving to and from work, using plastics made from petroleum, enjoying foods shipped in from thousands of miles away, without a thought of the very resource that makes this all possible—oil. The impact of oil has consistently reappeared in the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky for well over a decade. Burtynsky’s photographs often soar into the air, freeing us from our limited perspective, offering us the ability to better understand the scale and impact that this material has on contemporary life. It is only through this expansive perspective that we begin to understand the magnitude and consequence of our complicit actions. Recently, Daily Serving founder Seth Curcio was able to speak to Burtynsky by phone about his current exhibition, titled Oil, at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. During this conversation, we learn how Burtynsky’s research has altered his own relationship to oil, how he uses scale and perspective to shape our understanding of the industrialized world, and what lies ahead of us with the future of oil.

Seth Curcio: In the introduction to your book Oil, you said, ” In 1997 I had what I refer to as my oil epiphany. It occurred to me that all the vast, man-altered landscapes I had pursued for over twenty years had been made possible by oil…” Since that time, you have spent a decade and a half documenting the impact of oil consumption globally. How has this ongoing project shaped the way that you interact with the world, especially in regard to oil consumption?

Edward Burtynsky: At that point, I had spent sixteen or seventeen years trying to find the largest events possible around mining and quarrying. I was interested in places that we had collectively engaged, and that illustrate scale. I realized that the scale that I’d been photographing could only have been achieved through the combustive engine and a readily available fuel, such as oil.

These ideas led me to consider the things that are around me, from the fuel in my car, to the road that I am driving on, to the plastic container that was in my hand. They are all produced with oil. As I started to look around, I asked myself, What’s not oil?—and that became the more interesting question. It was at that point that I began to close the chapter on mining and open the chapter on the oil landscape. That started my research representing the extraction and refinement of oil, the urban worlds and events produced as a result of oil, and the end of the line: the final entropy and physical result of oil consumption.

Edward Burtynsky. Oil Fields #22 Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001. Courtesy of the Artist.

Through this, I was fully aware that I was involved in the consumption of oil, too. You simply cannot live life in the modern world without the usage of oil. We are all, in some way, participating in the material and resource. But I’m always trying to find ways to mitigate my own consumption and impact. I planted a forest in 1985 and have since cared for it as a gesture to offset my carbon usage. I’ve always been careful to purchase fuel-efficient cars, and each time I fly, I purchase from offset companies. It is always my hope to be able to offset my usage through these means.

SC: As an individual, our limited perspective often prohibits us from seeing the larger picture of our impact on the planet. Literally, shifting our perspective to 1,000+ feet above the ground can drastically change how we see the world. For me, this was strikingly evident in the expansive aerial photograph Highway #5, Los Angeles, California, USA. Can you talk a little about perspective and access as it relates to your work?

Edward Burtynsky. Highway #5 Los Angeles, California, USA, 2009. Courtesy of the Artist.

EB: When you stand at ground level, a real hierarchy begins to form. Everything in the foreground of the picture becomes dominant and hides everything behind it. The middle just becomes irrelevant at eye or ground level. But then I realized that as you move up a bit, things begin to reveal themselves and you get a real sense of the relationships between the foreground, middle ground, and background. The descriptive power of the elevated point of view becomes so much more interesting than the view from the ground. From this point, you really get the chance to understand the scale of the landscape or how much of something is there, like how many cars are backed up behind you or how many planes are parked together. You get to see and really understand scale from the elevated viewpoint. And for me, that is a way that I can describe the system in which we organize certain things on such a large scale.

Edward Burtynsky. Highway #1 Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003. Courtesy of the Artist.

EB: I do believe that an image has to be visually compelling to address the kind of landscape that will challenge us and make us ask the important questions. I think that artists don’t really have the power to change the world, but we do have the power to raise questions about the world that we are creating. In my heart, I feel that as artists we can hold a mirror up to society and help reflect upon exactly what we are doing and what type of world we are creating. All types of artists have the ability to take on this task. We must take on society and examine the condition of the human experience, and make sense of it as an individual and as a collective society. You are simply not going to get this type of storytelling directly from science. It is the role of the artist to tell this type of story. It’s inherent in the creative arts to reflect where we are going in a way that perhaps has not been thought of before. And aesthetics is a portal though which people will enter to explore these notions. But if the work is not visually interesting enough for them to enter, then you won’t be able to communicate anything at all to the viewer.

Edward Burtynsky. SOCAR Oil Fields #6 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006. Courtesy of the Artist.

SC: Your images are simultaneously seductive and aggressive, instantly placing the viewer in the question-asking role. This prompts one to consider their own place within the image, and how one’s own culture and daily activities contribute to a much larger problem. Paul Roth has said about your work, “The subject is not oil… These photographs are about man, and what he has made of this earth.” While the gravity of this resource is certainly evident throughout your pictures, I feel that the effects on humanity are most profound in the portraits found in the group The End of Oil.  Since you were on the ground engaging with people whose lives are directly impacted by man’s use of oil, I wonder if you connected with humanity in a way that was not possible in your more distant aerial photographs? Did making those portraits change the way you thought about man, and what he has made of this earth, as Roth suggests?

EB: When I went to Bangladesh, it was if I stepped back in time and was in the middle of the industrial revolution. Many of the people there were engaging in the most filthily hard, arduous work that can be conceived. I felt that I went back in time because I could never see this type of work in my culture, as that moment had long passed. These men were working barefoot in a scrapyard, cutting metal with a torch and no eye protection, and inhaling clouds of asbestos with no respirators. They are taking part in the collateral damage of western off-gassing. It’s a filthy job, cutting down massive ships that are technologically obsolete for our purposes. But to see these people barefoot and still holding a shred of dignity in these types of jobs, I felt that at some point it is important for humanity to enter this project and for viewers to see humans engaging with the end result of our impact, as opposed to those who participated in the beginning of the narrative. I thought it was important to show humanity in a very unfortunate situation, even as they are attempting to better themselves, so that the first world can really see exactly who is doing our dirty work. And that is why I wanted to have people appear and at that particular point in the narrative.

Edward Burtynsky. Shipbreaking #23 Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000. Courtesy of the Artist.

Overtime, it has become more apparent to me that these aren’t as much landscapes as they are places that illustrate the systems, such as how we extract oil from the ground, how we ship it, and how we build infrastructure to move machines around. The work is about trying to find a way to represent all of the systems that we have created to enjoy the benefits that the internal combustion engine and oil have afforded us. The images are not really about the singular place; they are a stand-in for the ways that we have changed our landscape to accommodate all of these things—this new way of life.

SC: Absolutely. The impact is so invisible to the western world. There are such small moments where we can see the effects of our culture on the rest of the earth. This brings to mind the times that we do get to see our actions unfold—like with the Gulf oil crisis. Considering that you had been working on this project and related projects for well over a decade when the Gulf oil crisis happened two years ago, what went though your mind when viewing those images and video on TV? What is your reaction to the incident and all that has occurred in that region since?

Edward Burtynsky. Oil Tanker and Refineries Pasadena, Texas, USA, 2004. Courtesy of the Artist.

EB: I went and photographed that area right after the situation occurred.  I had been working on a project about water, and I thought that this is a perfect example of an immediate oil and water event that was loaded with implications that were real and happening right now. I thought this would give me a change to see these all-important liquids in our life in an unexpected and unwanted marriage. It was like the Frankenstein story, where we did something and really didn’t fully understand the risks; we drilled to 23,000–5,000 feet of water and another 17,000 feet of bedrock to get to the oil. And then to have it all go bad and lose control of the well. It’s like when doctor Frankenstein creates life and then it turns on him and becomes a menace. The same scientists are then trying to contain it and get back into the lab, but its not that easy. It really is the process of science overreaching and then losing control. It’s a lesson that we keep repeating —not fully understanding the risk and moving forward anyway. Imagine if this repeats itself in drilling conditions in the Arctic. If there were a spill in the winter, there would be no way of reaching it; it would just gush all winter long and could very well completely destroy the Arctic. Imagine the mess that we would all be in then. The idea of an error occurring in the Arctic is a real nightmare. The Gulf has 35,000 wells. They are not new at this, and they have every bit of technology, help, and resources available at their disposal to help solve the problem. Now the Arctic is a completely different situation. With all of the resources available, it still took three months to stop the oil in the Gulf! In the Arctic, who is there to help? Who is there to save the day? Nobody. So it is a scary thought that we would advance into this region in our pursuits of this material.

Edward Burtynsky. SOCAR Oil Fields #4 Baku, Azerbaijan, 2006. Courtesy of the Artist.

SC: There is so many issues with the inevitability of another spill at the magnitude of the Gulf oil crisis. But the western world is so detached from the actual production of oil that it can seem out of touch. We just know that we still need it, and therefore another site will be built. Another type of technology will be invented to reach another pocket of oil. This brings me to the landscape pictures that you made under the umbrella of The End of Oil. They are so striking and haunting. These images really get to the essence of  not only the impact of our consumption of oil, but also the waste we leave behind. However, we know that no matter how many of these sites are used and abandoned, inevitably another will open to satisfy out needs. So seeing these images actually makes me consider the future of oil. I’m curious about what your discoveries have led you to think about the future of the man-made world in regard to this material? What do you see on the horizon?

Edward Burtynsky. VW Lot #1 Houston, Texas, USA, 2004. Courtesy of the Artist.

EB: I see it in terms of peak oil. It is not a question of if, it is a question of when. It’s not like peak oil is going to stop. It’s just like the 1974 peak oil problem: It crests, and no matter how much you pump, it can’t keep up with the public demand. All of the sudden you see supply go in one direction and demand go in the other. Then you get market adjustment; the prices go up to help reduce demand. It’s like playing ping-pong on a moving train; the price goes up and down, but really it’s always moving up and going forward. When we average it out, it will move from $100 to $200, $300, $400 per barrel, and that is what it will look like at different price points. As the price goes higher, more people will be left behind. Less people will be able to drive, fly in an airplane, and oil consumption will be left for those with more capital, while the rest of us deal with massive inflation. And third-world countries could be completely out of oil, leaving them with huge amounts of social unrest. In countries like China, you can see them purchasing oil fields and natural resources from anyone that will sell, as they know that they don’t have many of their own natural resources. They are stockpiling from locations around the world in preparation of their expanded development.  And there is going to be a lot of tension globally as we begin to hit peak oil again.

Edward Burtynsky. Breezewood Pennsylvania, USA, 2008. Courtesy of the Artist

But there is something that we here in the West can do. It  is called losing our addiction to oil. I feel that we could reduce our consumption by 30% through conservation: raising the fuel average to 50 miles per gallon in cars, producing alternative energy, and reducing the huge tax cuts to oil companies and giving them to green energy developers. There just hasn’t been the right emphasis put in the right places yet. Historically, big infrastructure changes have to come, in part, from the government. Just like it did with when we needed to add telephone lines, highways, and hydro development—it all came from the government. And if we are going to make these changes in relationship to our oil consumption, if we really want sustainable alternative energy, the government has to be there. It has to create a level playing field. It’s got to put oil in the same place as alternatives, and quit giving benefits to oil over alternative energy. Tax people for carbon consumption and alternatives start looking really good. We all play a part in this.

The exhibition Oil, by Ed Burtynsky, will be on view at the Nevada Museum of Art from June 9, 2012 – September 23, 2012.

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Plate" from "Lamia" series, 2013. Dyed resin and fig.

Born in 1984, Yukihiro Kaneuchi grew up in Fukuoka, on the north shore of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four major islands. Fukuoka is a large city, larger than Kyoto but also very environmentally friendly, and Kaneuchi describes the place as “sea/forest/mountain.” At any rate, his hometown is not a “crazy city” like Tokyo, and Kaneuchi keeps studios in both places. He acquired the shell, cuttlebone, and fishbone for his new series in Fukuoka where his space is close to the water, but put it together in the capital. It is called “Lamia.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Knife," "Fork," "Spoon" from series "Lamia," 2013. Organic materials, thread, resin, brass.

Kaneuchi studied design at Tama Art University and graduated in 2008. In 2009, Benetton awarded him a scholarship to do a year’s research at Fabrica, their communications research centre near Venice. “Fabrica,” they say of themselves, “is not a school, advertising agency or university. It is an applied creativity laboratory, a talent incubator, a studio of sorts . . .” Their home base is a 17th century villa rehabilitated by self-taught Japanese architect Tadao Ando, and it was there, working as a product designer, that Kaneuchi says he learned products “can/must” have “criticism and motivation.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Fork" detail from "Lamia," 2013.

I wrote to Kaneuchi about “Lamia.” The series consists of four pieces, or “products”—a plate, fork, knife, and spoon. When he made them, Kaneuchi was thinking about the essence of a product, which he calls “first intention.” He will mention the oldowan: a hand axe and the earliest stone tool, it is has been around for 2.6 million years. But now the minds and hands that have historically finessed rocks, metals, and animal parts into objects of special use are participants in an “incessant” global production-consumption model. “We need,” Kaneuchi says, “to reconsider the value and role of products to avoid over-saturation, decreasing quality, and negative environmental impacts.”

In fact, I thought the title actively referenced lamia the ‘carnivorous fish.’ I took the unthinking hunger of that fish as commentary on our global consumption patterns. But more specifically, Kaneuchi says he’s referencing Keats’ narrative poem of the same title, in which Keats rails against Isaac Newton for “unweav[ing] the rainbow“—for “destroying,” Kaneuchi says, “imagination/fantasy/feeling/sense.”

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, detail from "Lamia," 2013. Resin-beaded on thread.

In “Lamia” we have some atavistic things, artifactual tools concerned with eating. But when ‘forks, knives, and spoons’ are meaninglessly manufactured, it is possible to lose sight of what it is they do for us. It is possible for human acts, assisted as they are by tools—now commercialized products—to depreciate. Though what could be more universally important than the act of eating? Kaneuchi approaches these tools not just as a means to an end, but as expressions of humanness in its simplest form. “Lamia” becomes a cerebral, elegiac meditation on the loss of that humanity.

Yukihiro Kaneuchi, "Tiny landscape in a coffee cup," 2010. Stained ceramic.

Yukihiro Kaneuchi is talking about products that are well-made and -loved. He’s talking about the Velveteen Rabbit of eating utensils. It’s clear “Lamia” is a continuation of Kaneuchi’s earlier work. His preface to “Tiny landscape in a coffee cup” (2010), for example, reads brilliantly here:

When a product is created, it is as though new-born, with no memory or understanding of the world around it. These relationships are formed through user interaction over time; the product “ages” and gains knowledge of its purpose in the world. The stain’s image is a representation of the product’s feelings and memory as the product ages through use.

Recently, I was going to leave my boyfriend’s house with a noteworthy spoon. But I have been known to lose flatware in the depths of my car, and when my boyfriend saw me with the spoon, he said, “Not that one,” because it had been his grandmother’s, one of a few left. That scene came to mind when I found “Lamia” in my inbox. It is an ancient scene: humans and their tools, clever primates finding ways to walk termites out of their dens with sticks. We make tools and they make us human in turn.