e-flux presents Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities, and Environmental Memory
Spiritual Myopia
David Kelley, Patty Chang
2018
15 Minutes
USA
Date
August 14–27, 2020
Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of David Kelley and Patty Chang’s Spiritual Myopia (2018), on view from Friday, August 14 through Thursday, August 27, 2020.
Spiritual Myopia is a sculptural video work dealing with the invisible labor and desire of residents of the oil-industry boom towns of Fort McMurray in the Canadian Tar Sands, and Port Arthur, Texas. The two towns are terminal nodes of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline which would span the United States. Fort McMurray has the third largest oil deposit in the world. Its rapid pace of growth has meant a dearth of housing for its migrant workers. Port Arthur boasts the world’s largest concentration of oil refineries and its town center has nearly disintegrated from economic decline. These twin cities are related spatially as nodes in the same energy infrastructure, and temporally in their different stages of a boom or bust economy. Borrowing its title from Alfred Stieglitz’s photo Spiritual America, Spiritual Myopia speaks to the nearsightedness innate to hypercapitalism.
Spiritual Myopia is presented here as one of three films in Part One | Extraction: Environments and Communities, the first of six programs in the online film and discussion series Ecology After Nature: Industries, Communities, and Environmental Memory programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film.
Ecology After Nature runs from August 14 through November 8, 2020. The films in Part Two will screen for two weeks, and subsequent parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Sunday.
For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.