The urgency of time and the assault on the living planet is teased out in Flared, a comment on the endless wildfires consuming California and other parts of the West. The recurring motif of valves, spools and knobs, serving as armatures, is based on a photograph of oil pumping platforms that Sikander found in a 1962 issue of BP magazine, which referred to the rigs as “Christmas trees.” She equated the term and its context with ingenious English wit, wryly commenting on the gift-bearing capacity of the oil rigs. Sikander's interest in the hierarchies of power, such as the transnational ideology of global privatization where resources are gathered in the rubric of monetization: language, labor, human intelligence and human attention fuels this series, exploring the paradox of abundance and extraction.