oil spill

2024 · Oil, tar, acrylic, wood, foam, and sand · Surface Noise, COHJU, Kyoto

Installation view, Surface Noise, COHJU, Kyoto, 2024

The oil spill paintings begin with the heavy oil released by warships sunk in the naval battles of the Pacific War, damage that went largely unreported and unphotographed, long before the idea of an environmental crisis took shape. The black marks these overlooked traces.

The series also proposes a parallel history: that aerial photographs of oil spreading from sinking ships found their way, unconsciously, into the gestures of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Abstract Expressionism, in this telling, carries the memory of war and the environmental aftermath of naval combat within its surfaces.

The work is personal as well. My maternal grandfather served as executive officer of the carrier Shōhō at the Battle of the Coral Sea, and my father’s brother flew in the same operation as a U.S. fighter pilot. Had either died, I would not exist. Wood blocks stand in for the ships, set into the black surface.

The paintings hang as a scattered constellation across the wall, like wreckage seen from the air

oil spill, 2024. 5 × 8 in. (12.7 × 20.3 cm)

Detail. The painted surface, where the black spreads and pools like oil on water

Detail of another painting. Wood blocks set into the painted surface as sunken ships

Low view across the painted surface and wood blocks

Detail of sweeping black marks and raised wood blocks

Wood blocks emerging from the dark painted surface

Circular black gestures around a wood block

Light reflected across the textured surface of oil spill

oil spill
2024
Oil, tar, acrylic, wood, foam, and sand
Surface Noise, COHJU, Kyoto
Dimensions variable
From the Coral Sea series

Related: eight views of the sun setting on the south pacific, a series of digital collage prints drawn from the same history of the Coral Sea.

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