API 21901820 Slaughter, TX 2012

Mishka Henner made this image, API 21901820 Slaughter, TX, sometime around now, using photography. What strikes me is how the surface is divided between two contrasting areas. On the left, we see linear rows of farmland, and on the right, a textured, earthy ground. There’s this interesting tension between the ordered and the chaotic, the cultivated and the natural. It’s as though these two worlds are colliding. The materiality of the land is so present, you can almost feel the grit and dryness. Look at where the two textures meet, it’s not a clean line, but a gradual encroachment. The darker spot right there, the oil well, reminds me of a Robert Smithson sculpture, like something quietly industrial inserted into the landscape. It’s an uneasy image, in the sense that it shows this intersection of human intervention and natural landscape. It’s a testament to the ongoing push-and-pull between what we do to the earth and what the earth does to us.