Landscape by David LaChapelle

The sites depicted in LaChapelle’s Landscape represent the globally networked industrial infrastructure of oil production and distribution. The gas stations and refineries that populate iconic locations are staged as architectural avatars of a planet coping with the stresses of peak-oil – even as the buildings’ dazzling spectacle and retro-future aesthetic distracts from the dangers of their function. Both bodies of work use handcrafted scale models, constructed of cardboard and a vast array of recycled materials from egg cartons to tea canisters, hair curlers, and other by-products of our petroleum-based, disposability-obsessed culture