Precarious Living

In the fall of 2019, Tom Rice spent four months in Alberta, Canada, researching and developing material for an installation project that investigates North America’s unsustainable appetite for oil, and the impact of this on the environment. During this time, he was a Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta.

After conducting his research, field-trips and meetings with Canadian scholars and artists, he settled on using a local oil refinery as the main visual resource for his project. ‘An influential book for me at the time was Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement. The book’s title summed up perfectly how I was feeling about the predicament we face as climate change looms large. Ghosh essentially asks how we could have deluded ourselves so thoroughly about the realities of climate change when we had the facts and the chance to do something about it. What were we thinking?’

Ghosh’s approach avoids a good/bad binary to a certain degree, but implicates us all in the causes and denial of climate change. Rice pares back Ghosh’s arguments, but retains the message that ‘we are all implicated in the crisis of climate change by our inaction and participation in the fossil fuel economy.’

‘I felt that the refinery was a perfect contemplative object for our dilemma. For my project, titled Precarious Living, the Strathcona Refinery acts as a stand-in for the fossil fuel industry and its network throughout North America. The refinery complex is visible from all over the city of Edmonton, and people go about their lives in the shadow of it trying desperately not to think about the health and environmental implications it represents. The dirty business of fossil fuel exaction, refinement, and transportation typically take place outside the purview of most as we go about our daily activities ignoring the risks burning fossil fuels pose. Ghosh refers to this climate change denial as the Great Derangement.’

These images serve to remind the viewer of the inescapably ubiquitous petroculture in which we all are immersed, executed here quite consciously using vinyl acrylic (plastic) paint on thin plastic sheeting. The result is to suggest a maze, an all-encompassing world, or a perpetual never ending environment with no apparent way out.

Tom Rice is an American artist, whose artwork arises out of a concern for the environment, fossil fuel dependency and the growing global crisis related to climate change. His drawing installations explore our relationship to the planet we inhabit and the viability of a sustainable future.

In his own words, ‘the materials of my artistic practice are synchronised with, or are in opposition to, the environmental content of the work. I use thin plastic sheeting that can be folded, easily stored and cheaply shipped. In this way the work takes on the characteristics typically associated with sustainability. The obvious irony however is that the plastic that supports my drawing installations is made from petroleum or natural gas. The work questions whether it is possible to retreat from an industry that is so ubiquitously woven into every aspect of our existence and is the very foundation of our economy.

Much of my work focuses on the fossil fuel industries’ desire for profit at any cost and its effect upon the natural environment. Previous installations, like Extinguishing the Fire, explore domains where humans have failed to behave as good stewards of the planet and the effect of that negligence. We knowingly contribute to the degradation of the environment and do little to curtail behaviours that significantly contribute to the global crisis.

The problem is so large that it can seem abstract, but my projects seek to make the damage specific and personal, bringing human scale to a planetary catastrophe. The work mourns, reflects and documents the shifting uncertainties of the world. The drawings themselves are monumental. The scale is all-encompassing, a world unto itself – a reminder of the all-pervasive effects that climate change will have on our lives.’