Texas Oil - Landscape of an Industry

at Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston
January 17 - March 29, 2009
Opening Reception: January 16, 6 – 8 p.m.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research organization based in Culver City, California, involved in exploring, examining, and understanding land and landscape issues. Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry will be the culmination of the CLUI’s study of Texas and will show how the extraction and refining of oil has sculpted the state’s terrain. The exhibition will open with a “landscan” video, an extended aerial shot of petroleum refineries and shipping yards that shows the massive scale of these places. In addition to this projection, the galleries will be filled with CLUI photographs and texts on many different sites across the Lone Star State from west Texas oil towns such as Odessa and Kermit to petrochemical processing centers on the Gulf Coast and everywhere in-between. These places tell the incredible and often surprising story of an industry that fuels our civilization by using deposits of hydrocarbons to create gasoline, fertilizers, plastics, and many other products.