Exhibitions2016Petroleum

Exhibited at Baldwin Gallery, Turk's bronzes and shimmering dichroic found assemblage monuments presented a narrative ennobling of the lips we've collectively kissed: the loveliest and best, intimacy with their intricate propinquity. Anthropologically, it is our garbage, our 'left behind' that the future defines for our forever half-life: the universality of our basest natures in rear view.

But our refuse also reveals our most exquisite vulnerabilities, in fragility and resilience: what the Heian Japanese called 'mono no aware' and Virgil 'lacrimae rerum'- the aching pathos of things. Both created from and used by man, then furtively discarded: breath and lips and held to chest or hip. 

With Petroleum, Turk redeemed these 'twice-manmade' fragments from our secret shame of uselessness. We are reflected, in a world that raises production above all other values, where the waste seems almost immoral: slatternly in our post-consumptive rapture.