CAROLINE RUFFAULT ^(FR)

The Sky is Bigger in Texas is a visual enquiry into the disappearance of landscape due to automobile use and the ecological catastrophe it is creating in the Permian Basin in the north of Texas. Alone at the wheel, the artist sees the images unfold through the windscreen; interior photographs that overlap iconic clichés of the American West: great open spaces, the wide screen of Hollywood films, romantic visions of exploration. This voyage of discovery, albeit her own, pushed her to deconstruct the glamorous image of the road-trip. Behind the post card imagery is hidden another reality, that of a scarred and transformed territory. The reverse shot of the landscapes we consume in magazines and on social media, is the earth mutilated by petrol extraction, the oilwells, the tracks of roads on once virgin land. These idealised visions paradoxically contribute to their own destruction. Like the Stalker in Tarkovski’s 1979 Soviet film, Schuyler Wright, a rancher met during a residency at Marfa, guides Ruffault across his land, revealing a landscape ravaged by oil extraction. The pumps are syringes draining a black and viscous blood. The landscape has been eaten away by thousands of drillings, spitting out polluted water like a gruyere cheese under pressure. An infernal cycle where rivers are dried up, the ground sinks and where fields have become chemical lakes. Immersing her camera film in fracking water, the artist superposes the reality of this destruction onto her fantasised images, and in doing so confronts collective visual memory with the actual and tangible effacement of a territory.