Jessica Christy
Through the Window [2014]
Bakken Boom, Plains Art Museum
Fargo, North Dakota [link]
Christy’s one-hundred-fifty pristine pinewood boxes contain ephemera found in her neighborhood addressing the North Dakota oil boom. Broken bottles, cigarettes, bottle caps, work gloves and hazard tape speak to the dominant masculine culture present in the oil camps. Interspersed amongst the flotsam are small tourist-like photographs boasting “new views” of the changing landscape. Christy inserts a gendered autobiographical perspective with the nail polish bottle filled with oil and broken mirror shards found outside Heartbreaker’s Gentlemen’s Club. Her clever, humorous wordplay offers the visual archive a sardonic anthropologist’s critical perspective on the destructive social, cultural and economic effects of the boom.
~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of Colette Copeland
