Fri 11/19 – Sun 1/30
“The Dominion of Oil” is a solo exhibition by Cle artist Kathy M. Skerritt analyzing the effects of oil spills and humans’ uncanny ability to destroy the very planet that sustains us.
Read on for the details:
Deeply disturbed by the rhetoric around and implications of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill off the southern coast of the United States in 2010, Skerritt was impelled to respond in a definitive manner. She felt an urgency to move beyond the usual ways of removing oneself from events that seem to be not connected to the personal because they occur in distant locales. To this end, and for the first time in her portfolio, the artist incorporates quotes and written narrative onto the painted surfaces, offering up the words that influenced how individuals, communities, and nations responded to the event as well as words that may have not yet been heard.
The Dominion of Oil is not only Skerritt’s response to Deepwater Horizon, it is a culminating expression of the implications of a much larger pattern of human degradation of Earth inclusive of the Prudhoe Bay/Exxon Valdez oil spill as well as the burning of the Kuwaiti oil fields. New works include “Drill, Baby, Drill!,” “I Want My Life Back,” “You Can’t Fool the Fish,” “Regeneration of the Diatoms (Restoration of the Beautiful),” and “Whose Cry? Whose Voice?” depicting the artist’s response to the Niger River Delta catastrophe in which the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez has been spilled onto the land and into the water every year for at least the past two decades.
The exhibition is on view through Sun 1/30/11. Catch the opening reception & artist talk on Fri 11/19 @ 5 – 7PM.
[Photo of Skerritt’s painting Whose Words? Whose Voice?, 2010.]
The Gallery at Old Stone – 91 Public Square – Cle: Downtown
http://OldStoneChurch.org/dominion_of_oil.htm
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