"The medium of simulation speaks to these scenes as they are in effect minimal, and have a curious synthetic quality." John Gerrard

First exhibited at Thomas Dane Gallery in 2010, John Gerrard’s Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado), 2009-10 depicts a Lufkin brand oil derrick silhouetted against a blue sky. Gerrard’s digital practice is facilitated by the utilization of realtime 3D to capture surrealist scenes of industry. Gerrard has chosen this subject in order to capture the slow and steady nature of the lever arm of the machine as it see-saws back and forth, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As the artist comments, “I tend to call the works simulations. In terms of what drew me to this particular working space of simulation it dates back to the mid 90's… Two things became clear at that time. One was that the computer, with its ability to model reality, was something to absorb and put to work artistically. Secondly, the 3D scan allowed me to think of photography as a three dimensional form.”

Gerrard has digitally mimicked a rather mundane real time event using a technology typically associated with fast paced, “player controlled images of video games.” Referring to his video pieces as “portraits of places,” Gerrard explains that he “tries not to get too bound up in invention and stereotype – which is so very common in the wider medium of realtime 3D / gaming engines.” The uninhabited and derelict landscape in Lufkin (near Hugo, Colorado), 2009-10 is activated only by a manufactured power, the element of weather and human workers have been removed. The only humans are Gerrard’s viewers, miles away surrounded by a digital world, unable to alter the perpetual cycle of time as seen through the eye of Gerrard’s orbital, 360-degree camera. Gerrard’s audiences are, as the artist’s describes, positioned in a “slippery space between the real and the representation of the real.”