The Hydrocarbon Era’s Spectacular End

Dustin Yellin, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist whose intricate 3D photomontages adorn the likes of New York’s Lincoln Center, wants to draw your gaze to climate change. Not in a subtle way, either. He plans to stand an oil supertanker on its end in the ground—a structure soaring 1,000 feet into the air.

The Bridge, as Yellin dubs it, would repurpose a piece of energy infrastructure as a ready-made artwork, complete with elevators and a viewing platform for visitors, capturing the sheer scale of our energy system. The difficulty of hoisting thousands of tons of steel into the air would itself symbolize the monumental challenge of retooling our hydrocarbon-fueled civilization in the face of climate change.