The Physical Impossibility of Prehistory in the Car of Someone Living
This work is a meditative practice on the colonial, gendered, and violent relations between oil and capitalism, and the tender, monotonous, deep time of motherhood. The searing prehistoric wail of a Texan pumpjack punctuates a small child’s movement as she covers her face in petroleum products. This embodied relationship between skin and petrocapitalism echoes through different temporalities and histories deep and vast. Immortalized through the precious magnitude of presence, the observer is drawn into a relationship with the primordial and the materiality of time. The title of the piece is a reference to, and critique of, Damian Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991).