David Kelley
2021Spiritual Myopia
David Kelley, Patty Chang
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
Flotsam Jetsam
David Kelley, Patty Chang
The film follows the fabrication and journey of a wooden submarine to the Three Gorges site on the Yangtze river—once a landscape most often depicted in traditional Chinese painting, now submerged to accommodate a hydroelectric dam. Wavering between documentary and fictional modes of address, Flotsam Jetsam explores landscape’s relationship to identity.
Flotsam Jetsam
