Kevin O'Connell

In austere, elegant color and black-and-white photographs, Kevin O’Connell captures the vastness of the American Great Plains and the human encroachment onto this landscape. He became enamored with the region during road trips between Chicago and Denver. In his words: “I am haunted by vastness. The experience of a distant unending horizon and an unprotected, vulnerable, existential exposure stay with me always—I have been obsessed with it ever since my early travels across the Great Plains in the late 1970s.” His series “Conventional Entropy” is a suite of medium-scale, color photographs focused on the outdated and rusting pipelines, pumps, tanks, and towers formerly used to extract oil from the area. Through these disused pieces of infrastructure, O’Connell hints at fracking—the new method of energy extraction that has replaced them—and its concomitant environmental degradation.