Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas )2017
Western Flag depicts the site of the 'Lucas Gusher' - the world's first major oil find - in Spindletop, Texas in 1901, now barren and exhausted. The site is recreated as a digital simulation the center of which is marked by a flagpole spewing and endless stream of black smoke. The computer generated Spindletop runs in exact parallel with the real site in Texas throughout the year: the sun rising at the appropriate times and the days getting longer and shorter according to the seasons. The simulation is non-durational (having no beginning or end) and is run live by software that is calculating each frame of the animation in real-time as it is needed. Situated at the very gateway to the Coachella Valley and the city of Palm Springs Western flag acts a stark reminder not just of the willful exploitation and depletion of resources that millions of years ago covered this former sea floor with an abundance of life, but of the energy taken to return the deserted land to its current state of artificial habitation. The invisible gas responsible for climate change is here made visible. Flying the flag of our own self-destruction we are asked to consider our role in the warming of the planet and simultaneous desertification of once fertile lands.
Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) 2014 by John Gerrard is a computer simulation of an actual power plant known as a solar thermal power tower, surrounded by 10,000 mirrors that reflect sunlight upon it to heat molten salts, forming a thermal battery which is used to generate electricity. Over the course of a 365–day year, the work simulates the actual movements of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky, as they would appear at the Nevada site, with the thousands of mirrors adjusting their positions in real time according to the position of the sun.
Further developing Gerrard’s realtime portraits of physical locations, Exercise (Djibouti) 2012 harnesses simulation and motion capture technologies to create a temporal collage in which disciplined athletic bodies perform a perpetual militarised exercise of strategic capability and intent. On a simulation of the barren landscape of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, two teams of computer-generated figures meet daily at dawn to initiate a series of cryptic gestural routines – precise, repetitive, faintly antagonistic.
As with the other works in the Exercise series, Live Fire Exercise has been developed from a single image: a photograph from what is known as a 'live fire exercise' by the US Military, or an exercise using explosives. The photograph was sourced on the US military media interface site Defence Video and Image Distribution System: www.dvidshub.net
In the work a single explosion occurs each afternoon - producing a form which is held sculpturally until burning out in twenty five minutes - the time of the original performance.
The two Dust Storm works (Dalhart, Texas and Manter, Kansas) both derive from a single archival photograph, dating from the 1930s and depicting one of the legendary dust storms that ravaged the American middle West during that time.
The Dust Bowl, as the region was thereby deemed, has been identified historically as a central player in the economic slump of that time – the Great Depression.
·JOHN GERRARD·
Born 1974, North Tipperary, Ireland
Lives in Dublin, Ireland + Vienna, Austria
http://www.johngerrard.net
Image Courtesy:
The Artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, London and Simon Preston Gallery, NY.
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