CSL Response

In response to Matthew’s blog post, I myself also see that although Ted Kerr claims himself to be a non-biased artist, his personal views on the Shell’s artist-in-residence project point him in a different direction. His apprehension towards sharing his sexual preference with the workers he was interacting with on a daily basis tread the line between himself hiding it for the benefit of his art and him neglecting to share it for fear of the workers shunning him because of it. To look deeper into Kerr’s hesitance, I have chosen to focus on the realization that a majority of the workers at this particular worksite were men. Within Alberta’s energy economy, women are not assumed to take part in the dirty jobs of the work; such as pipelining, swamping, etc. Perhaps this is not only a thought of Kerr’s, but an assumption that is shared by Albertans in general. Kerr discusses how “anybody growing up in Alberta has a mythical love of those industrial scenes,” and his focus instead shifted from the industry part of the work, to the human faces of those who conduct the work itself.

Yet it is not only Kerr that has preconceived assumptions. I assumed that when discussing an artist-in-residence for Shell, that I’d be observing paintings and perhaps murals. Not photography as an art form. This reflects back on class when we discuss what constitutes as art, and whether or not it is activist in nature. Kerr understands himself to be an artist freshly starting his first job within a paid position, and because he was hired by a large transnational corporation, it is clear that he was intimidated with the results that he was going to provide Shell with. Perhaps his work was biased to begin with, in regards to his acknowledgement that, “the early shots were static, as if I were compiling a human resources brochure. I was battling the urge to be pleasing.” But after looking at the pictures he concluded his placement with, it is clear that he no longer looked at Shell as an intimidating factor in making or breaking his career. Instead, he turned his lens to the workers as people with stories and a passion for their work. It is when he changed his stance on what work he was going to be presenting to Shell, that his work shows the passion for his art and the story he wants to tell through his photos. By putting faces on the energy economy of Alberta, it humanizes the work and personalizes the statistics and readings we read in class.