Edward Burtynsky’s ‘In the Wake of Progress’ lets visitors get up close to nature’s destruction

By Sue Carter
Toronto Star

The lush forest in the opening sequence of photographer Edward Burtynsky’s “In the Wake of Progress,” a monumental new film installation at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre, provides visitors with some digital tree-bathing.

Visitors can move around and get up close as a caribou saunters and a bald eagle flies in, surveying the scene across three nine-metre screens. An animator spent six months in post-production adding wildlife and movement to one of Burtynsky’s panoramic still photos and the effects are seamless, down to the rustling ferns.

Despite the peacefulness, there is underlying anxiety. This is Burtynsky, after all, who has dedicated his 40-year career to documenting human impact on the environment. Serenity isn’t the intended takeaway from “In the Wake of Progress.” It’s a call to action and to witness.

Read the full article here.

Famed Toronto photographer pledges prints for Ukraine donations

By Jeremy Nuttall
Toronto Star

One of Canada’s foremost photographic artists is raising money for humanitarian relief in Ukraine by giving a special print of a famous work to the first 30 people who show him a $10,000 receipt for a donation to the Red Cross’s humanitarian relief for the country.

Read the full article here.

Famed Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky donates his archives to Ryerson: ‘My work is a chronicle of how we’re transforming the land and bending it to our needs’

By Sue Carter
Toronto Star

Edward Burtynsky gifting his archives to the Ryerson Image Centre marks a circular journey for one of the world’s most esteemed contemporary photographers.

The downtown university has just announced the first instalment of his multi-year donation to its photographic gallery and research facility. It features 142 photos from Burtynsky’s early career, created between 1976 and 1989. Subsequent annual donations, to span three to five years, will add more chronological works from his five-plus decades of visually documenting how so-called human progress and industrial spread have environmentally devastated the planet.

As a young student from nearby suburban St. Catharines, Burtynsky was exposed to groundbreaking ideas at the School of Image Arts at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University) in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Along with art classes, Burtynsky studied sociology, psychology and film. He felt encouraged to take risks with his photography, thanks to energized faculty members such as Marta Braun, whom he credits with teaching him art history.

Read the full article here.

Famed artist Burtynsky turns his talents to making 3D masks for COVID-19 fight

By Shinan Govani
Toronto Star

Peering at it all through the Lewis Carroll-like looking-glass of Instagram, shortly after catching up on “Top Chef,” I stumbled upon the feed of one of Toronto’s best-travelled people, Edward Burtynsky. Interesting! A J.M.W. Turner for our time (as he has been called), the marquee photographer — known for his sweeping industrial landscapes which rest in collections ranging everywhere from the Tate to the Guggenheim, and which have earned Burtynsky enough of a following to warrant an extensive profile in The New Yorker a few years back — he is grounded, these days, like most of us. But has been making the best of it. Actually making, I should say.

Read the full article here.

The Sundance Film Festival’s anticipated premieres include the Canadian documentary Anthropocene and a making-of doc about Alien

By Peter Howell
Toronto Star

The 2019 Sundance Film Festival will take moviegoers from the Earth to the moon and to the deepest part of space where no one can hear you scream.

Robert Redford’s annual independent film showcase in Park City, Utah, running Jan. 24 to Feb. 3, could be called a “Triple A” event for three of its most anticipated offerings: the Canadian-made environmental exposé Anthropocene, a 50th-anniversary revisiting of the Apollo 11 lunar achievement and a making-of documentary on the horror classic Alien.

Read the full article here.

Sprawling Anthropocene project shows humanity’s enormous impact on the planet

By Murray Whyte
Toronto Star

The camera sweeps slowly, right to left, along a towering ridge of ochre stone. The sense is of the monumental — the kind of majesty and scale that only the primal force of violent nature, operating at planetary scale, could yield.

Then you see it, and the world turns suddenly sideways: An enormous, churning machine enters the frame, like some kind of apocalyptic ferris wheel, carving grooves into the cliffside with its set of jagged claws. That towering bluff of dusty earth seems to shrink before your eyes as it yields to the clanking monstrosity gnawing at its hide.

But it’s not the only thing taking a hit here. That built-in sense of feeling tiny and insignificant in the face of nature’s grandeur has been turned thoroughly upside-down. As the scene makes clear, the dominant force shaping the planet at is most colossal scale is now us.

That’s the shorthand version of the thesis for Anthropocene, a film and a set of sprawling exhibitions — one at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the other at the National Gallery of Canada — that opened simultaneously this weekend. Taken together, they’re a full-blooded collaboration from photographer Edward Burtynsky and the filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, which, while not a new partnership for any of them, is the most seamless one yet.

Read the full article here.

ANTHROPOCENE shows fierce beauty of rapidly collapsing Earth

By Peter Howell
Toronto Star

★★★★

ANTHROPOCENE: The Human Epoch — a companion piece to exhibitions of the same name opening Friday at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery in Ottawa — is rife with such horrors, yet there’s a fierce beauty to the work of Baichwal, Burtynsky and de Pencier. They travel the world with an artful lens that makes human constructions seem awe-inspiring — but only from a distance.

Read the full review here.

Edward Burtynsky’s environmental themes emerge with a harmonious new context at the Art Gallery of Hamilton

By Murray Whyte
Toronto Star

Edward Burtynsky’s great big photographs ooze uncomfortable truth, though the artist himself, careful not to preach, once took a more ambivalent stance. But at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, where a few dozen of the 76 pictures he recently donated to the museum are now on view, an unintended synergy freights even his earliest images with the unleavened urgency they demand. Terrible beauty, Burtynsky’s esthetic calling card, remains present, never fear. But these days, terror comes first.

The Burtynsky show, Witness, is surrounded by Water Works, an engaging, alarming exhibition that largely concerns itself with the accreting perils of depleting, poisoning or otherwise contaminating our most precious resource. The AGH, for its part, cries coincidence, but, seriously: To get to his pictures, you have to first walk right through it. Taken together, they send alarm bells ringing: Effect, meet cause.

Continue reading here.

NEWS HUB