September 17 to October 11 2026: TB Ward & Susan Richman
Opening Reception: Friday September 18, 5 - 8 pm
Perhaps the story is somewhere in those tunneled glimpses of the natural paradise that we exist within, and in those places emerging that we must endure once we have totally wrecked it. ~TB Ward
TB Ward:The Rubicon
Image: TB Ward, The Rubicon, Oil on Canvas, 12 × 12
In Crude Futures, botanical specimens and vulnerable wildlife are partially submerged in oil, caught between the surface and being pulled under. One part remains visible while the other is engulfed, obscured, and slowly transformed. Their suspended state reflects the fragile threshold between life and suffocation.
Oil is both material and metaphor. It fuels modern civilization while driving ecological collapse. Thick and inescapable, it coats, weighs down, and drowns botanicals and wildlife, becoming an active force that slowly overtakes living systems. These vulnerable species become stand-ins for a broader condition—our shared dependence on the very substance that threatens the environments we rely upon.
Rather than depicting a singular catastrophe, Crude Futures considers environmental destruction as a slow, cumulative process. As botanicals and wildlife are gradually consumed, they mirror a future in which ecosystems—and ultimately humanity—are drawn beneath the weight of extraction, consumption, and fossil fuel dependence.
Image: S. Richman, Bugbane Squared, Archival pigment print