09/02/2026
Susan Richman's CRUDE FUTURES opens Thursday, September 17.
In CRUDE FUTURES, botanical specimens are partially submerged in oil, caught between the surface and being pulled under. One part remains visible while the other is engulfed, obscured, and slowly transformed. Their suspended state reflects the fragile threshold between life and suffocation.
Oil is both material and metaphor. It fuels modern civilization while driving ecological collapse. Thick and inescapable, it coats, weighs down, and drowns the plants, becoming an active force that slowly overtakes living systems. The plants become stand-ins for a broader conditionâour shared dependence on the very substance that threatens the environments we rely upon.
Rather than depicting a singular catastrophe, Richman considers environmental destruction as a slow, cumulative process. As the plants are gradually consumed, they mirror a future in which ecosystemsâand ultimately humanityâare drawn beneath the weight of extraction, consumption, and fossil fuel dependence.
