“An Uneasy Beauty”
On Saturday March 21st I packed my notebook and pen and drove out to the Surrey Art Gallery to go see what Edward Burtynsky was all about. I watched Burtynsky’s Manufactured Landscapes and saw the interview he had with George Stroumboulopoulos on The hour. I learned that he came from a Ukranian Background and that his father had worked in a GM factory. When asked about his photographs, Burtynsky does a good job at avoiding sides. According to Burtynsky good art opens up meaning, his images in particular don’t tell you how to think, they have an open narrative.
On my way into the Surrey Art Gallery there was a piece entitled Wirefram by John Wynne. The piece features a dark room in which you enter. When inside the participant is emerged in complete darkness. Small “ticks” can be heard all around and are used to let the viewer visualize a landscape. The ticks grow louder and soon thunderous booms can be heard all around giving the impression of a thunderstorm. The best part of the piece was outside of the room where you can view participants on a screen filmed with a NVD that react to the different sounds and to each other.
The rest of the exhibit was of Edward Burtynksy’s work, which focused on settlements, energy production, resource extrusion, trade and transportation. The first half of the gallery is decorated with photographs of British Columbia’s Interior and Lower mainland, most of which are fairly mundane yet compelling. The next half of the gallery features work that Burtynsky photographed while he was in Alberta. The photographs feature container ports and the oil fields of Fort McMurray which is some of Burtynsky’s finest, most compelling work. Most of the Oil Fields photographs are taken from an arial view, exposing the desolate, lonely yet unsettlingly beautiful landscapes. Burtynsky photographs the lanscape as it is with it’s true colour, leaving the piece to speak for itself without intervention of the artist. The gallery itself seemed to be biased towards the environmental aspect of Burtynsky’s work. To quote the text that is beside the Oil Sands photographs, “the terrors of the industrial sublime have found their greatest expression.” Alberta Oil Sands #6 is one of Burtynsky’s strongest pieces in the gallery, which features baths of sour crude mixed with sulphur, turning the oil a sickly greening yellow. At the scale of the photograph, the patterns in the crude oil are quite beautiful in a unsettling kind of way.
The exhibit also features a video of Burtynsky giving a presentation at the TED awards. In the video Burtynsky speaks of his epiphany he had lost in Pennsylvania photographing the landscape. Burtynsky also speaks of the oil epiphany he had after photographing the disassembly of oil tankers in Bangladesh and the oil field in California. Burtynsky speaks of the three wishes he has, the first being “world changing” in which he uses his images for a “global conversation on sustainability”. Burtynsky introduces the blog www.worldchanging.com in which features countless articles about Burtynsky and his photographs. I was surprised to see an article on my personal favourite artist Shepard Fairey entitled Notes Toward an Affirmative Art. Burtynsky’s next wish he calls “in my world” in which he would use his earnings from the TEDprize to fund a project that would allow kids to invent new ideas on sustainability. His third wish would be to make an imax film which would allow his work to be displayed on the largest scale possible, reaching new audiences in the process.
