The notion of conventional entropy harkens to the idea of decay in a conventional sense
or in the context of conventional energy extraction and that's really what this exhibit's about.
The constant theme to all of this is that this infrastructure is in a state of decay
and so we're extracting energy out of the earth with machinery that will ultimately
end up in a junk area or bone area as we come.
Now this particular oil field which I focused on a lot was in Weld County, Colorado.
The field was considered dry in the late 80s and then they discovered the concept of fracking
or were able to implement it in a cost effective way and now they're re-drilling this field
and getting record yields on the oil and the gas.
But it's really turned into a very unpleasant place to be.
The oil and gas traffic is chaotic and so you're out in these country roads and big trucks
and water trucks for the fracking and drill rigs.
It's turned into, it's turned the Great Plains into an industrial landscape.
So I started photographing the Plains in the early 1990s.
I had moved here from Chicago in roughly 1981, Colorado specifically and I came from that
crazy industrial environment and I drove across the Plains and I was astounded by the notion
of all this bassness in the sky.
It took me almost a full 10 years to be able to confront that in my work.
I had spent the 80s making small photographs in the mountains of intimate little landscapes.
When I went out to the Plains it required a completely different way of seeing.
I often described that work from the 90s as pictures of nothing and it was a process
oriented endeavor.
It was really about being in those places and having that, what I refer to often as
an existential experience, it's a very confrontational landscape.
For the course of time I saw the changes take place in eastern Colorado really with respect
to oil and gas development.
The landscape, the impacts, the sequential oil blooms that came and busted were all very
disturbing to me and in fact some of my favorite places to go, one in particular the Pawnee
Grasslands in northern Colorado, has been decimated by oil development and wind development.
It breaks my heart to go back to these places today and see the chaos in the industry, the
power lines, the wells, the fracking, the diminishment of water.
It's easy to get pessimistic about the whole situation and what we're doing to the land.
I don't have any answers so I really temper my photographs with that premise.
We're on a path now that no one knows really where it will lead.
It's a depressing, morose concept but the future is, I believe, bad and I can't apprehension
at this point.
We just have no idea how we will evolve and how the land will evolve with or without us.
But with that said, I think that there is reason for hope and when I look at these machines
and these old technologies I realize how antiquated they already are.
So perhaps in another generation or another century, we will look back at this time and
place and think, my God, we were primitive people and that's my only shred of hope I
can hang onto.
I'm Kevin O'Connell and this show is Conventional Entropy.
It runs at the photo gallery through April 5th, 2014.
