Petrochemical America represents a unique collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and landscape architect Kate Orff. It brings into focus the industrialized landscape of the Mississippi River Corridor that stretches from Baton Rouge to New Orleans – a place that first garnered attention as “Cancer Alley” because of unusually high reports of cancer and other diseases in the area. The Project Room exhibition reveals traces of their collaborative process and features Misrach’s haunting photographs of the region and Orff’s Ecological Atlas, a series of visual narratives, or “throughlines.” The dialogue between photograph and drawing begins to unpack complex economic and ecological forces that have shaped this landscape, mapping cycles of extraction and transformation from the scale of the neighborhood, to the region, to the globe. Ultimately, this joint enterprise offers an expansion of both disciplines and a richly researched and concretely visualized study of the petrochemical industry and American culture, which has become intricately intertwined with its output.

 


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Location Details:

Aperture Gallery
547 West 27th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001

Touring venues:

Northeastern University, Gallery 360
Boston
January 17 – March 15, 2015

Pomona College Museum of Art
Claremont, California
September 2 – December 19, 2014

Perlman Teaching Museum, Carleton College
Northfield, Minnesota
April 4 – June 5, 2014

David Brower Center
Berkeley, California
September 12, 2013 – January 29, 2014

LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph
Charlotesville, Virginia
June 7 – June 29, 2013