'Petrolia' Opens this Saturday, August 17

Andreas Rutkauskas, Park - Corunna. 2012, 102 x 127 cm, chromogenic print mounted on dibond

The community of Oil Springs, southeast of Sarnia, was home to the first commercial oil field in North America. While Sarnia is better known today for its extensive petrochemical industry (referred to as Chemical Valley), Petrolia creates a juxtaposition with this region’s industrial heritage landscape.

Petrolia presents co-existing themes of the decommissioning or scaling-back of petrochemical processing in Chemical Valley, while simultaneously investigating the pastoral landscape and small-scale, family-operated oil industries of Lambton County. Large-format photographs present views from the periphery of Chemical Valley – a dense social landscape where First Nations ceremonial sites, abandoned industry, and environmental responsibility initiatives all converge, while other images introduce the lush setting of ancient oil fields that have been operated by the same families for many generations. 

Andreas Rutkauskas, Video Still, Oil! 2012, Video installation with sound, 10 minutes, 24 seconds.

Inspiration for the exhibition came in February 2011, when Rutkauskas was invited by the JNAAG (then Gallery Lambton) to participate in an artist-in-residence project while they closed their doors in preparation to move into a new space. His residency consisted of five visits to Lambton County in order to develop a collaborative research idea with writer/artist Lee Rodney from the University of Windsor, the Sarnia Artist Run Collective for Arts, Science and Music (SARCASM), and JNAAG curator Lisa Daniels. As part of Andreas's research project, members of our community assisted in his artistic practice by taking him on virtual walks of their favorite locations around the county using a GPS. It did not take long before they brought him to the site of Oil Springs.

'Petrolia' artist Andreas Rutkaukas poses with one of the large scale images from the exhibition.

About the Artist

Andreas Rutkauskas is originally from Winnipeg where he completed a BFA at the University of Manitoba. In 2003 he moved to Montreal and obtained an MFA at Concordia University, where he now teaches in the Studio Arts department. His projects have recently been exhibited at the ODD Gallery (Dawson City, Yukon), TRUCK Contemporary Art (Calgary, Alberta), and the Foreman Art Gallery (Lennoxville, Québec). His work has been supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

To learn more about upcoming exhibitions at the JNAAG, visit our website