John Gerrard

Selections from John Gerrard’s new NFT series, titled Petro National, will be displayed across a group of custom screens installed along an entire wall of the space. The first NFT project to be released as part of the new partnership between Pace Verso and Art Blocks, Petro National comprises 196 unique, generative works that engage the potential of spatial and temporal media online through game engine technology. The Petro National NFTs feature the outlines of different countries, which are represented as glistening patches of gasoline on the world ocean.

Petro National examines the global impact of burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and the ways that energy consumption has become a signifier of political power. The project explicitly addresses the disparity in oil use between the global north and south, and the Petro National NFTs depict oil spills of different thicknesses depending on the local per capita annual oil use of the respective country. Lower national consumption rates yield thinner, more delicate spills in the NFTs, while higher consumption rates produce more intensely iridescent scenes.