PETROLIANA: Nick Smith

The series has its roots in a journey Smith made through the Mojave Desert in 2012, a memory he revisits through photographs and films from the 1950s and 60s. From these, he creates scenes poised between recollection and invention. Roadside architecture, broad skies and softened colours evoke an America familiar through its imagery, yet distant in time.

Building on the diary format of his previous series, Pool Diaries, Smith imagines himself working at a dusty gas station somewhere between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Each work depicts a different station on a summer’s day, with its title recording the date. An accompanying log follows life as it passes: arriving cars, the people who step out of them and the small dramas that punctuate the hours, all set against the persistent desert heat. These observations give each scene its own rhythm, finding interest in the routines that make one day distinct from another.

The log becomes the text beneath Smith’s individual colour chips, connecting the construction of each image directly to its narrative. From a distance, the chips resolve into the architecture and surroundings of a gas station. Up close, the scene breaks into separate colours and words, inviting the viewer to read the day’s events. Moving between these two ways of looking, the viewer encounters both the outward appearance of a place and an imagined experience of being there.

For the attendant, none of this is remarkable. The cars, the signs and the colours of the forecourt are simply the working day. Only from a distance do they become the America we think we remember. Throughout Petroliana, nostalgia is grounded in the particulars of daily life. Places associated with travel and passing through become settings for stories told by someone who stays. By giving these familiar roadside scenes an intimate, imagined voice, Smith invites us to look beyond their iconic status and consider the everyday moments unfolding within them.