A Sky Taste of Rock

This series of photographic works by Julian Charrière employs the medium’s oldest technique first developed by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in 1822. Using bitumen collected from the oil fields in Fort McMurray, Canada, a light-sensitive emulsion has been created to process images taken at the oil fields onto polished stainless-steel plates. Each piece is a diptych of one aerial shot and one long exposure to the late summer, Canadian light by way of Camera Obscura. Numbers featured in the title correspond to the geographic coordinates where the photographs were taken. The series stands as a conceptual mise en abyme: a view of and from the flow of hydrocarbons, addressing their impact on our modern powers of visualization through a return to material sources.