MARBLEIZED OIL FROM THE GULF OF MEXICO

Abstract

How can we respond to the ever growing, ever multiplying ecological tragedies without sinking into a quagmire of negativity and fear about the present and the future? Lisa Moren performs a brave and important art of inquiry into the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and accomplishes the nearly impossible task of expressing both the despair and the hope. She does not turn away from the devastation, but plunges into its materiality, extracting what she can to make something else out of it. Something else that nourishes our desire for a future — not of denial or even recuperation — but rather one where we might pursue possible ways out of the mire. While art cannot offer us political solutions, it can sustain our sense that there can be another way, and in this Lisa Moren’s work is a great gift, evoking the sense of other possibilities that we need in order not to turn a blind eye, in order to respond, to care about our eco-system.