Landscape and time have remained the subjects of many of Gerrard’s subsequent works, each of which can take him and his Austrian team up to six months to design. A series called “Smoke Trees,” begun in 2006, is based on individual specimens—from venerable oak to noble pine—growing near the artist’s childhood home in County Tipperary, in the south of Ireland. Gerrard constructs the trees the way he constructed the man in One Thousand Year Dawn, in the virtual round, and the viewer can simulate circling them by pivoting the screen. Instead of sprouting leaves and producing oxygen, however, the smoke trees cough up carbon emissions in gray clouds, inverting actual conditions on either side of the nature-culture divide for an age of accelerating climate change and seemingly rampant natural disaster. Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas, USA)—seen in the group show last summer at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York—similarly invokes ecology. In the 2007 animation, an ominous tempest looms on the horizon of a rural grassland. The work’s panoramic view comes from photographs the artist shot on location, the image of the storm from 1930s archival photos of the Dust Bowl, which resulted from the confluence of cyclical drought and the reckless expansion of agricultural activity made possible by fossil fuel–powered farm equipment. But Gerrard devised the algorithm that defines the dark cloud’s roiling by looking at video of a dust storm in Anbar Province in Iraq, taken by an American soldier. In a strange reversal, Dust Storm makes our contemporary thirst for oil, and an attendant blindness to its effects on the world, animate a historic catastrophe in the panhandle of George W. Bush’s home state, a disaster that was likewise driven by oil, rapaciousness, and willful ignorance of the consequences.

Gerrard’s latest work points toward a growing mastery of his medium. Animated Scene (Oil Field) (2007) comprises a pair of monitors, each with the mov-ing image of a pump jack, facing east, both nodding in unison as they draw oil out of the ground. Each is visible from the monitor that features the other, as if the screens were two windows onto the same virtual, pump-filled prairie. Their movements recall a devotional gesture, like the directional bowing of Muslim prayer, but instead of Mecca they face the rising sun, which once fostered the growth of the flora and fauna that became the very petroleum their gestures bring back to light. Here Gerrard bends time poetically, not by using literal duration but through his deft deployment of symbolism. The 33-year-old artist envisions his next works as room-size installations with multiple views onto a single space, through which realistic figures will move about, seemingly at will. These new pieces will give the subjects of his art an appearance of agency and temporal existence equivalent to that of their viewers, turning the medium of computer programs and illuminated screens into a looking glass onto a world at once mesmerizing and foreboding.

"Introducing: John Gerrard" comes to ARTINFO from the November 2007 issue of Modern Painters.