Centre des arts actuels Skol

Colin Lyons : Fitzgerald Rig

by Chris Lloyd

Colin Lyons grew up in Petrolia, Ontario, a town of little more than five thousand but which once stood at the centre of the world’s oil industry. It is home to the first oil-drilling wells in North America and had oil booms in 1898 and 1938. Founders of the Petrolia oil fields—called Hard Oilers—used their expertise to teach others their methods of accessing oil throughout the rest of the world, including the Middle East, and effectively kick-starting the modern petroleum industry. The once-bustling town has since fallen into obscurity, though efforts to resuscitate its glorious past are apparent through such efforts as the Petrolia Discovery, a living museum with functioning oilfields. Within the Discovery is the Fitzgerald Rig, still the largest oilrig in the world. It has been pumping oil continuously since 1903, though now production has trickled to barely a barrel per day, or just enough to keep the museum running.

In an act of homage, Lyons has created his own Fitzgerald Rig, effectively turning the history of his hometown into the driving force behind a unique series of printmaking sculptures. This kinetic sculpture calls attention not only to industry and renewable resources, but also the intrinsic differences between memory and history. Drawing on both the history of printmaking and the boom and bust cycle of industrial towns, he merges process and content to create his own perpetual motion machine.

Working from photographs and his own memories of the Petrolia Discovery, where he worked as a student, Lyons has re-constructed the Fitzgerald Rig, from the jerker lines to the massive bull wheel. Each element is treated as an etching, with the pulled prints cut and folded into sculptural forms. And while tradition has long stressed the importance of the multiple in printmaking, Lyons reinterprets this basic function by furthering the role of the etching plate. His Fitzgerald Rig begins pumping when the etching plates are dipped into an acid bath, using the ensuing chemical reaction to form a battery. Thus the plates that create the prints also power the kinetic sculptures, but their inevitable decomposition also terminates the print editions.

Lyons’ work creates ambivalence between history and memory, especially as it pertains to a former boomtown. The lonely oil rig, still pumping oil but only for itself, is the physical reincarnation of memory, of a so-called living history, but is also a stark reminder of the very foundations of our current civilization. While debate rages over Peak Oil and what diminishing oil reserves will mean for the global economy, not to mention our ecology, the rig pumps on, oblivious to its own role in global history.
Pierre Nora believes memory and history to be in fundamental opposition: “Memory is life, borne by living societies, founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation… History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.¹” Lyons’ oilfield can therefore be seen as an exploration of the function of art in preserving memory.

Though the Fitzgerald Rig has been preserved as a functional memorial to a glorified era, it operates out of time, in a vacuum, scraping bottom, and in fact negates the living power of memory. The reinterpretation and transformation of the original into a work of art enters the magical slipstream of memory. The newly opened space for reflection can aid us to see industrial processes from a fresh perspective, which resonates with a hint of foreboding. For while the slow, meditative movement of the paper oilfield may lull us into a belief of endless perpetual motion, this slowly depleting power source ultimately challenges our convictions of stability, and reveals nature to be inherently temporary.

¹ Pierre Nora, “Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire.” in History and memory in African-American culture, edited by Geneviève Fabre and Robert G. O’Meally.