Sarah Christianson | When the Landscape is Quiet Again

Since 2012, Sarah Christianson has been documenting the legacy of oil booms and busts in her home state. In particular, the artist is interested in how the region is currently undergoing change today due to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.  Through long periods of investigation and documentation, her photographs bear witness to the transformation of western North Dakota from a quiet, agrarian landscape to that which is now an industrial zone – dotted with well sites, crisscrossed by pipelines, lit up by natural gas flares, and contaminated by oil and saltwater spills.  At present, the Bakken oil field is pumping out over a million barrels per day from over 13,000 active wells, making North Dakota the second largest oil-producing state in the nation, closely following Texas.

Heightened industrial activities have brought a steady stream of revenue, people, and jobs to this economically depressed region. While workers come from far and wide, residents, too, are eager for a piece of the action. The artist wrestles with her own implication in the hidden costs of prosperity: since the start of the boom, her family has been profiting from oil wells drilled on the land where her great-grandparents homesteaded in 1912.
 
Experts originally anticipated that the ‘Bakken Boom’ would continue for several decades, but falling oil prices have triggered another bust—the third to happen in the state. In her work, Christianson examines the scars from North Dakota’s prior boom-and-bust cycles and the new wounds being inflicted upon her home. For the artist, the status quo must change; something needs to be left for the next generation, not the next quarter.

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