Art of the interregnum in Canada’s Chemical Valley

This chapter examines few contemporary, experimental photo, video, and performance works that speak to the interregnum as it relates to a small corner of southern Ontario, Canada, which houses a dense area of petrochemical factories. In Canada, oil and gas industries are today almost synonymous with the province of Alberta, with its infamous tar sands, as well as with the various contested pipelines in it and other Western provinces. Less acknowledged is southern Ontario’s important role in this industry. The extractivist dreams and erasure of Indigenous peoples in what is today southern Ontario has a much longer history. The temporality of the photographs and video evoke the last 165 years of oil development in the area as something both historical and contemporary, foregone and still present. The photographs reference not only Lambton County’s past as an oil frontier town, but also, with the inclusion of modern-day infrastructure, the present.