Valerie Uher will be visiting from University of Toronto on Friday 25th September to deliver a talk on petroculture and public art, co-hosted by EEHN and the Department of English. Many thanks to EEHN member Peter Adkins for hosting.
‘”This Symbol of Man Rearranging Molecule Clusters”: York Wilson’s The Story of Oil and the Labour of Petro-Culture’
Friday 25 September, 4-6pm
Project Room (1.06), 50 George Square
In 1954, York Wilson was commissioned by Imperial Oil to paint an enormous mural in the first-floor hall of the company’s Toronto headquarters. The Story of Oil offers a triumphant celebration of oil’s transformative effect on modern life, from prehistoric rock-filled gloom to sun-drenched petro-scape. This mural, which powerfully linked extraction, modernist aesthetics, and post-war nationalism in Canada, was crucial to legitimating Imperial’s ambitions with publics and policymakers alike.
The Story of Oil was part of a broader mid-century phenomenon in which oil companies mediated their own cultural and social significance through activities that melded art, promotion and propaganda. These companies, including BP, Shell, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, produced their own “image worlds” (Nye 1985) through such activities as petro-film (Damluji 2015), petro-periodicals (Khalili 2024), and petro-media (Roehl and Jekanowski 2022). The paintings, murals, and photographs funded by these companies were frequently enmeshed with postwar nationalist aspirations. This was particularly evident in Canada, where the art funded by Imperial Oil intertwined oil extractivism with a burgeoning Canadian national ethos. This entanglement was the basis for contemporary petro-nationalism, in which critics of oil’s economic relevance are framed as “anti-Canadian and foreign to the body politic” (Gunster et al 2021).
Drawing on new research conducted as part of my SSHRC postdoctoral project at the University of Toronto, The Story of Oil: Petro-Nationalism, Oil Values and the Arts in Canada, this talk analyzes two artefacts from the Imperial Oil archive: Wilson’s The Story of Oil, and the film Mural (co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada), which documents the work’s creation. Unlike his mentors Charles Comfort and David Alfaro Siqueiros, Wilson chose to exclude workers from his visual imagery of industrialized extractivism. By attending to the mural’s paratexts and the depiction of assistant painters in the documentary, I explore how the eviction of labourers from the scene of extraction in Imperial’s oeuvre indexes a widening cultural gap between the company and the Canadian public. I examine Wilson’s writings on artistic labour alongside his 1959 battle with the International Brotherhood of Painters, Decorators and Paperhangers of America—in which he successfully put down a unionization drive—to facilitate a broader conversation regarding the nexus of labour representation within the petro-cultural sphere.
Author Biography:
Dr. Valerie Uher is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Environment, Conservation and Sustainability and the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research explores the intersection of resource rhetoric, labour and extractivism in literature, visual culture and communications media. Her research project at the IECS examines the political consequences of shifts in the oil industry’s engagement with the arts in Canada. She is co-editor of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory and her writing has been published in Canadian Literature, ESC: English Studies in Canada, and The Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.
