US oil fields photographed by satellites orbiting Earth. Each print is composed of hundreds of high-resolution satellite images of each location stitched together.

The Nazca had their lines and the Americans have their oil fields. The former drew animal figures on the ground and the latter carved an industrial logic into the earth.

These oil fields reflect a circuitry pumping through the heart of American culture. The tentacles of the oil and gas industry span the vast territory of the American landscape like the veins and arteries of a body. The oil flows like blood. This is a system for living and dying and it’s difficult to imagine the country and the values it exports without it.

The landscape of America is a patchwork of industry, agriculture, and desert. Between the deserts is a vast man-made circuit board of infinite detail and complexity. Only in the silence and vacuum of space - seven hundred miles above all the noise - does the network of America truly reveal itself.

A constellation of ex-military and civilian imaging satellites that captures every square inch of our world’s surface is now accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. This constellation allows us to see the vast network in its material form.

Is there a deeper truth to be gleaned from the millions of interconnected pump-jacks spread across the US? Are there parallels between the mobile devices that connect us and the transmission lines of industry? Do we, like them, exist as nodes in someone else’s network?

I needed a year to learn to read these landscapes and to understand the difference between the shadow of a pipeline and that of a telegraph pole; To recognize a transmission line from a dirt track or an operational pump-jack from a disused one. It wasn’t a purely visual landscape but one of data stacked in layers as thick and as deep as the rock being mined.


Various dimensions and materials, site specific installations.