In her first solo show at Prince11, Lisa Röing Baer presents us five works depicting oil pumps from various angles, which she first encountered on a trip to Las Vegas. These industrial structures drip in political meaning, representative of just about anything. And yet, the pumps stand like rusty dinosaurs, closer in appearance to remnants of a bygone era than signifiers of rapid and untamed advancement. Röing Baer was drawn to their ambivalence. Their agedness coats them in a form of melancholia, nostalgia even, since any being or object close to death invites feelings of loss, for the thing itself and for everything else that changes with its disappearance.

As the title of the series suggests, each piece is what Röing Baer considers a collage of paper, wood and glass. Engraved onto the glass of the frames, receipts document the photographer’s movement around the oil fields; burgers, groceries, fuel – everyday items marking the end of the production process. They follow the trajectory of consumerism, from extraction to product to consumption, while illustrating the artists’ navigation of this system.

While the photographs of the oil pumps could have been taken at any point within the last few decades, the engravings on the artwork contextualize the images, locating them in time and space. There is no barrier that sets the artist apart from the artwork, and only through the positioning of the artist in relation to the pieces do they gain an added layer of meaning. This type of subjectivity is crucial to Röing Baer’s work. There is not a disembodied camera, not an objective observer floating around capturing the cold facts of reality. She is looking from within, wandering through the industrial landscape that she is immersed in, embedded in her motif and in this word.