I often feel immersed in data about the oil and gas industry and fracking, and I’ve learned a lot from that data. But sometimes I find that different approaches to this topic provide a surprising, yet aligned, vision. Sometimes it is stunning.
If you are in New York before September 10, 2023, check out the Amant Museum in Brooklyn. Sung Tieu’s exhibition about fracking, Infra-Specter, grew from her curiosity about the gas pipeline infrastructure being built near the museum. An ArtReview article gives those of us that can’t make it to NYC a tantalizing overview.
I am proud that Open-FF helped a little in her work. She created Mural for America, a collection of 1,900 stainless steel plaques with the names and either CAS numbers or “Trade Secret” labels from the FracFocus chemicals. She and I talked about the frustrations of FracFocus and I offered the Open-FF lists to help inform the design of her mural.
In another review of the exhibition, Helena Haimes describes this mural as “…brutal, aesthetically and conceptually, bluntly depicting our limited knowledge of fracking’s longer term impact.”