Please note that exhibition dates are dependent on Ontario's Reopening Steps and are subject to change.
Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, Edward Burtynsky is one of Canada’s most internationally recognized artists. He is a photographer and filmmaker whose imagery is often compared to historical European landscape painting. His unconventional but quintessentially 21st century views of nature and industry have also been described as “exquisite pictures of ugliness.”
This exhibition features a selection of photographs Burtynsky gifted to Museum London in 2019. These trace his career from the early 1980s to 2017. The artist’s dramatic, often abstracted, images record ecological changes wrought by humans across the globe. This exhibition tackles themes including the industrial modification of our inhabited landscapes, the devastation caused by environmental exploitation, and the advent of the “Anthropocene”—a geological term for the Earth’s industrial epoch. Burtynsky bears witness to these harsh realities through photographic compositions that, ironically, brim with an almost painterly beauty.
Artistic expression can inspire learning and change. Through his vivid panoramic views, Burtynsky surveys the relentless, global and self-inflicted damage to the planet. What remains is to act now. As the artist notes, “The greatest existential threat is thinking that the next generation will fix the problem.”
Image: Highway #2, Intersection 105 & 110, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003, digital chromogenic colour print on paper, mounted on archival Stonehenge on dibond, Gift of the artist, Toronto, Ontario, 2019