Louis Helbig

Artist Statement: Beautiful Destruction – Alberta Tar Sands Aerial Photographs

The Alberta tar sands are a place of superlatives, a place of awesome beauty and destruction. They are a kaleidoscope of contrasts, colours, and patterns keeping time with the seemingly unstoppable movement of machinery, smoke and effluent. Their scale is other worldly. The details peculiar and surreal.

The tar sands defy any normal human experience; the beauties of the place, the stunning contrasts – the interplay of colours, forms, lines, oil, water and light – are, separate from its many issues, simply incredible.

The images in the Beautiful Destruction exhibition were collected in the summer of 2008 and the winter of 2012.

Since beginning to display this imagery in 2009 I have discovered that my interpretation of this controversial subject seems – more often than I could ever have predicted, or hoped – to transcend the shrill polarities that have encumbered the issue in Canada. The art seems to provide a space for some viewers, whatever their opinions or preconceptions, to reflect and engage their imaginations, themselves and each other.

Canada is America’s single biggest supplier of oil, mostly from the tar sands. The country has joined Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Nigeria and Norway as petro-states. This sort-of-kind-of-happened; in place since 1967, the tar sands become the world’s largest industrial project as a direct result of a 1995 industry/government collaboration called the National Declaration of Opportunity.

I embrace the very recent (January 2012) and unprecedented blossoming of substantive debate and media coverage in Canada about the tar sands and its many related and complex issues. It has, unfortunately, not always been so.

In 2007, when I began to think about this project, the only suggestion of its importance was in Canada’s real-time culture: the buzz at Tim Horton’s coffee shops across the country about the jobs and money in Alberta, the migration of tens of thousands to Fort McMurray in the middle of the Athabasca tar sands. There was little media coverage, Canada’s mainstream political parties avoided it, Canada’s environmental organizations were essentially absent, and the Canadian oil industry, if it deigned to respond to criticism, deflected by raising the flag of western alienation, a particular form of Canadian regionalism.

The meaningful debates were taking place in the United States or Europe, defining Canadians and Canadian society, through the prism of the tar sands – in absentia. A particular low point came in 2010 when, with the US ambassador as host, Canada’s oil CEOs, environmental leaders, cabinet ministers and some provincial premiers crowded into the US embassy in Ottawa each vying for the attention of Nancy Pelosi, the then Speaker of the United States House of Representatives. Somehow Canada’s leaders and institutions lacked the maturity, moral authority and imagination to engage each other and all Canadians in an honest conversation on Canadians’ own terms. This would be difficult to imagine in most other countries, but is not atypical of Canada, its leaders and institutions.

Many similar examples, involving the tar sands, abound.

Now, for the first time, Canada is having a real, substantive, wholly Canadian debate centred around the Northern Gateway project, a pipeline proposed to connect the tar sands with Kitimat, British Columbia and Asia’s markets. In it Canada’s economic relationship with the United States, the roles of foreign organizations (international oil firms as well as outside environmental NGOs) and the rights and aspirations of First Nations people across whose land the pipelines might travel are all being argued. This debate is colourful, complex and profoundly important.

The tar sands, as with its pipelines, are of our creation, a human project, with all the contradictions and drama inherent to that. They are as good and bad, as beautiful and destructive as we are as human beings. I hope my art opens a window on that.