By Mike Balsom
Niagara-on-the-Lake Local
Edward Burtynsky’s In the Wake of Progress is a stunning distress signal for an Earth under threat by climate change.
As such, the 20-minute immersive film and sound experience acts as the perfect centrepiece to Art in Action: Climate, a 10-day event aiming to “illuminate the beauty and fragility of our planet,” while also reflecting on the cost of progress.
The St. Catharines native has spent four decades turning his lens toward the destruction wreaked upon the world by humans. Like his previous films—Manufactured Landscapes (2006), Watermark (2013) and Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018)—In the Wake of Progress, presents awe-inspiring visuals to sound the alarm on the profound and long-lasting effects of an ever-expanding population.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreYourTV Niagara
A 10-day experience that illuminates the beauty and fragility of our planet is underway at the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre in St. Catharines.
Watch the full segment here.
Read MoreBy Maryam Siddiqi
The Globe and Mail
Fishing and foraging, canning and gardening in Niagara’s fertile landscape. Biking to the Welland Canal to watch the ships go through. Working on car parts at the General Motors and Ford plants. Every one of these experiences influenced photographer Edward Burtynsky while growing up in St. Catharines, Ont.
Burtynsky now lives in Toronto, and left St. Catharines in the late seventies to attend university, but his hometown has stayed with him.
“A lot of what I’ve gone on to do in my life with my work has been informed in many ways by those formative years,” he says.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreSesaya Arts Magazine
By Scott Sneddon
Photographer Edward Burtynsky’s stunning pictures don’t just show the impact of humanity’s industrial footprint on our planet. They scale it to a register that feels uncanny, mesmerizing … even sublime.
With a Burtynsky photo, you find yourself staring, seduced by composition and rhythm and detail … only to realize, maybe with a shudder, that the subject is slag or oil sands tailings, feedlots or quarries. The renowned Canadian artist famously captures natural sites that have been transformed by industry. A globetrotter, he has made his way into famous, infamous, and sometimes jealously guarded sites here in Canada and the US, as well as in distant lands like China, Bangladesh, Italy and Australia.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy John Law
St. Catharines Standard
As an 11-year-old kid living in St. Catharines, Ed Burtynsky got his first camera and he recalls feeling “so excited” at the possibilities.
He would go on to traverse the globe as one of Canada’s most respected large-scale photographers, depicting nature transformed by the world we’ve created. He has won several environmental awards and was named an officer of the Order of Canada in 2006.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Virginia Lewis
Art in Action: Climate Blog
This January, when Burtynsky returns to his hometown, he and his work will take centre stage at Art In Action: Climate, showcasing a 40-year career that has earned photography exhibitions in over 80 museums around the world, a coveted spot in the International Photography Hall of Fame alongside inductees that include Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz, and a host of other honours.
“I think that kind of early exposure to both nature and industry really prepared me to venture into work that’s taken me around the world looking at how both industry and we as humans are shaping the planet.”
Read the full article here.
Read MoreThe Oldie Podcast
Charlotte Metcalf is a journalist, editor, award-winning documentary film-maker and was co-presenter of the Break Out Culture podcast. She is Subscriptions Editor and a frequent contributor at The Oldie.
Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian artist and photographer and award-winning film-maker. A recent major retrospective at London’s Saatchi Gallery showed his large format photographs, many vast, of industrial landscapes all over the world. While they resemble beautiful abstract paintings, they depict industrialisation’s devastating impact on nature and human existence.
Listen to the episode here.
Read MoreBy Casey Beal
BESIDE Magazine
Edward Burtynsky’s award-winning, large-scale photographs illuminate the environmental cost and alarming beauty of human intervention in natural landscapes. We spoke with him about his artistic influences, human responsibility for the planet, and the great grief behind it all.
Read the full interview here.
Read MoreBy Chris Dart
CBC Arts
The super-producer's collaboration with Edward Burtynsky looks at humanity's impact on the world around us.
Ezrin is the co-producer of In the Wake of Progress, an immersive short film based on the 40 year career of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. (The other co-producer is Burtynsky himself.) The film, which looks at the effects of resource extraction around the world, made its debut last year, and is currently the centrepiece of a Burtynsky exhibition called Le paysage abstrait, on now at Montreal's Arsenal Contemporary Art gallery.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreCulture Club, Ici Première
“An important, essential, disturbing exhibition. Everyone must go and see [it].”
Listen to the full segment here.
Read MoreBy Stéphanie Bérubé
La Presse
Heureusement, il y a l’art. « L’art peut éveiller les consciences, lance Ed Burtynsky. Et cet éveil est la première étape menant à un changement. »
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Stéphane Baillargeon
Le Devoir
Photographiés de très loin et de très haut par l’oeil unique du Canadien Edward Burtynsky, un étang d’eau salée du Sénégal évoque une toile de l’abstraction lyrique, le delta du Colorado fait immédiatement penser à une oeuvre de l’expressionnisme abstrait et d’autres prises encore de champs ou de mines, captées aux quatre coins du monde, rappellent les travaux de Clyfford Still, d’Hedda Sterne ou Adolph Gottlieb.
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Read MoreBy Randy Renaud
CHOM 97.7
Bob Ezrin produced The Wall for Pink Floyd, Peter Gabriel's debut album, Destroyer for Kiss, Alice Cooper's classic early albums, U2's latest album, as well as albums for Deep Purple, Rod Stewart, Jane's Addiction; and he dropped by the CHOM studios to discuss a new multi-media production that he is involved in, called Le Paysage Abstrait, at the Arsenal Contemporary Art Gallery all this month. Randy Renaud talks with the legendary Canadian producer about his remarkable career, and the many artists he has worked with, and Ezrin shares personal stories about Peter Gabriel, The Edge, and Pink Floyd, and reveals whether he is still friends with Roger Waters.
Listen to the full interview here.
Read MoreDaniel Browning
The Art Show | ABC Radio National
Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian-Ukrainian photographer who captures human activity on Earth that's normally too big to perceive, except through aerial photography.
His scenes of rapid industrialisation and large-scale pollution characterise the Anthropocene, the idea that we are in the age of man-made environmental crisis. So how does he pick his monumental subjects? And what has he witnessed over his 40-year career?
Listen to the episode here.
Read MoreBy Neha Kale
The Saturday Paper
Caspar David Friedrich’s unsettling vision of the sublime is a key inspiration for Edward Burtynsky’s chronicles of human destruction of the natural world.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Declan Bowring
ABC Radio Sydney
Photographer Edward Burtynsky has spent his life trying to capture the environmental cost of civilisation and he is struggling to keep up.
"The world's making more of my subject every day," Mr Burtynsky told ABC Radio Sydney Breakfast presenter James Valentine.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Sarah Ward
Concrete Playground
When January rolls around, Sydney Festival fills the city with a massive array of arts and culture events, and kickstarts each new year in style in the process. But sometimes there's something on the fest's bill that's just too exciting to hold back until its next season — and filling the Oxford Street Precinct with nine-metre screens showcasing stunning aerial industrial landscape images from a renowned photographer is one such event.
Those photos hail from acclaimed Canadian Edward Burtynsky and, from Thursday, August 25–Sunday, September 18, they'll be on display in Sydney's Taylor Square. Sydney Festival is setting up three screens as part of an installation called In the Wake of Progress, a free immersive multimedia piece which'll span 40 years of Burtynsky's work.
Read MoreBy Nick Galvin
The Sydney Morning Herald
Pedestrians passing through Darlinghurst’s Taylor Square will next week be confronted by three massive electronic screens showing startling images of global industrial landscapes.
Called In the Wake of Progress and accompanied by an original score, the epic multimedia project is a clarion call for action on climate change.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreAustralian Photography
The work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky – known for his large-scale depictions of humanity's impact on the planet – are set to blanket Sydney’s Oxford Street precinct from next week.
Towering across three immense nine-metre screens, Burtynsky’s new work, In the Wake of Progress, will 'envelop and illuminate' Taylor Square from 25 August until 18 September as part of the Sydney Festival.
Read the full article here.
Read MoreBy Chrissie Goldrick
Australian Geographic
The very fabric of our daily lives; the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the homes we inhabit and the cars we drive depend upon vast global supply chains that in turn rely on the exploitation of human and natural resources to create and maintain. The irony of Burtynsky’s large-scale depictions of humanity’s impact on the planet is that his images are absorbing, mesmerising and often jaw-droppingly beautiful.
A major new public multimedia installation featuring his work will open in Sydney in August, and the man himself will be there to present a series of talks and events at the Australian Museum in partnership with Sydney Festival. Projected across three 9m screens, In the Wake of Progress will illuminate Oxford Street’s Taylor Square in Darlinghurst from 25 August–18 September 2022.
Read More