Informed by a long-standing interest in ecological issues, Cynthia Minet’s animal sculptures — featuring her signature use of found plastic materials and LED lights — address the complicated roles of plastic, consumer culture, and electricity in modern life. Minet’s Jacked: Panthera Atrox is one-part animal and one-part machine combining the form of the panthera leo atrox — an extinct North American lion whose remains have been excavated from the La Brea Tar Pits — with the mechanisms of a modern-day oil pump jack. By using post-consumer plastics to construct the hybrid form, Minet draws attention to both the past and the present of petroleum, simultaneously referencing the ancient animal remains that have been preserved in the Miracle Mile area’s tar pits and highlighting the damage that consumption of petroleum products has had upon the environment and animal species. In doing so, she illustrates the entire cycle of petroleum, from its discovery in its rawest form as tar to its processed state as everyday plastic.

Exhibition Photography: Blake Jacobsen