Viktoria Ciostek

Labels by Cohen Sulzbach, MST 622 Researching & Presenting Museum Collections, 2020

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? The mountains and the clear blue sky. Can you smell the fresh air? The sun is out but you can almost feel the crisp breeze dancing through the trees. Viktoria Ciostek captures the beauty of the Alaskan landscape and draws your attention to the winding 414-mile strip of Dalton Highway. Can you imagine what we would see if we followed the truck to the end? Would you guess something just as scenic? Could you even begin to imagine the jarring, monstrous reality; that we would see around the bend? Machinery for miles, fire shooting straight into the sky, the smell of burnt oil. Silence is nothing but a memory, as the roar of metal on metal reaches its crescendo. Is what the oil industry gives us worth the price we are paying? What would happen if reusable energy isn’t the path we choose?

For Youths:

Hey you. Yeah, you! Follow me, okay? Where to? Just the end of the world. Where Mother Nature says goodbye and where the scar of the industrial U.S. can be seen for miles. Have you ever seen a truck drive to the end of the world? I’ll show you how it’s done! I am the line-leader though, okay? So, make sure you follow close. No, there is no time to stop! We’ve got 414 miles to go. We got the end of the world to see. Past the trees, into the mountains. Into the frigid Arctic Circle, but don’t let the blue sky fool you, it’s freezing! Well, behind the mountains, is where it ends. Not a tree in sight, giant, hulking metal as far as the eye can see, fire shooting straight into the sky. Can you picture it? Is nature as important, or even more important than the oil industry? How else can we go green?

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Polish-born artist Viktoria M. Ciostek seeks imagery that pits some of America’s rare, remaining pristine landscape against evidence of human devastation. She provided information about her photograph, which was exhibited in Bridging the Great Divide: Landscape from Tradition to New Media at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in 2014:

The Dalton Highway, also known as the North Slope Haul Road, is a 414-mile stretch of road in northern Alaska. Built to support the transport of supplies to the Prudhoe Bay oil fields at its terminus and the great Trans-Alaska Pipeline System that it parallels, it is one of the most isolated and dangerous roads in the United States. Only 3 towns exist along its path, housing no more than 13 to 25 residents in each town. Extreme caution must be exercised when navigating the road as it slices past the Arctic Circle through the Brooks Mountain range into desolate tundra, an unforgiving landscape that demands that plants and animals must be extremely resilient to survive. 

Upon reaching the road’s end at Deadhorse, the gateway to Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean, the beautiful nature of the landscape completely dissolves leaving nothing but a maze of metal and machinery. Oil wells, tankers, pump stations, liquid nitrogen plants, flow stations, automatic blowup preventers, gathering stations, pipe layers, and prefab trailers run from camp to camp-plots belonging to the various oil companies that lease the land for consumption. Flames burning natural gas soar in the distance and despite the movement of trucks and distinct sounds of the crude oil harvest; the settlement is as desolate and cold as the surrounding terrain. With billions of dollars of infrastructure and 5000-6000 gallons of oil being pumped a day, it is a chaos that is shocking to witness.