Aaron Huey’s series GASOLINE GARDENS addresses the issue of climate change in the form of decorative wallpaper. The artwork, made with AI trained on his photographic archive from the Tar Sands of Canada, invites viewers to engage with transformed images of environmental crises in their everyday spaces.
Inspired by 18th-century decorative arts, the works reference a past era of global transformation by depicting historical wallpaper patterns like chinoiserie which depicts idealized exotic landscapes, or Toile de Jouy with its pastoral scenes. In 2024, Huey incorporates these decorative formats as text prompts in a model trained on his climate crisis photography archive. Colorful florals mix with spirals of smoke, industrial refineries, and diminishing forestry, blurring the lines between aesthetic appreciation and ecological awareness.
GASOLINE GARDENS is based on Huey’s project, WALLPAPER FOR THE END OF THE WORLD which he made available as free downloads at crisiscurated.com. This integration of such imagery into domestic and public environments, from boardrooms to bedrooms, creates a persistent, if veiled, reminder of our environmental challenges.
“By using my archive as a new lens, I can untether myself from the act of capturing a singular decisive moment. I can engage in an ongoing process of exploration and creation from those seeds of the past. What emerges is a hybrid reality where what is and was converges with what is not (or cannot be), as well as what could be in some future world—a multiversal viewfinder looking through another kind of lens.”
– Aaron Huey
Verisart Certified: https://verisart.com/works/4d99acc6-03eb-40d3-b03d-cc191b4a8c93
