Oil Stick Work

Irish artist John Gerrard presented a large-scale installation of his work, Oil Stick Work (Angelo Martinez / Richfield, Kansas) 2008, on a vast bespoke wall in Canary Wharf station.

Using customised game-design software to craft stunningly accurate virtual worlds, Gerrard projects a complex digital moving image that eerily develops in real time and will continue to do so over the next 30 years. The viewer joins this hyper-real scene three years into its slowly unfolding story on a desolate Midwest prairie.

At daybreak (PST), the tiny figure of Angelo Martinez, a Mexican-American builder, arrives at a solitary aluminium corn silo and carefully paints a perfect black one metre square on the exterior of the structure with an oil stick crayon. Working a six-day week, from dawn to dusk, Martinez will painstakingly paint the entire building, transforming it into a black void on the virtual landscape. On the 20th December 2010 Angelo finished painting the first wall and at dawn (CST) on the 21st December he started a new wall. In 2038, he will complete the task and leave the scene.

The viewer is left in no doubt, Martinez could be any of us making a futile but resolute attempt to change the way things are, one stroke at a time. It’s no coincidence that Gerrard invites the commuters of Canary Wharf to watch the Mexican’s daily progress over the course of the year that his vast ‘virtual sculpture’ is on show at the station.

About the artist
John Gerrard, (born 20 July 1974) is an Irish artist, working in Dublin and Vienna, best known for his sculptures, which typically take the form of digital simulations displayed using Real-time computer graphics.

Gerrard’s works concern themselves with the nature of contemporary power in the broadest sense, epitomising the structures of power and the networks of energy that characterized the massive expansion and intensification of human endeavour that took place during the twentieth century. Many works have featured geographically isolated industrial facilities that are a hidden part of the global production network that makes the luxuries of contemporary life possible. Gerrard’s works are constructed as simulations or virtual worlds, using 3D Real-time computer graphics – a technology originally developed for military use, and now used extensively in the videogame industry. Although making use of advanced digital technology, Gerrard’s work has been noted for its resistance to being categorised as ‘new media art’. Gerrard himself regards realtime 3D as ‘a post-cinematic medium in which one can manipulate and interact with time in new ways’. He has also said that the works constitute a continuing reflection upon his own time: ‘these melancholic realms are in some way a road movie of the Twentieth Century, a revisiting of the extraordinary comforts and freedoms that I’ve experienced.’

Commissioned by Art on the Underground