Edward Burtynsky: The Human Signature

An exhibition of new work by Edward Burtynsky. These works, created in collaboration with Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, stem from the artist’s ongoing Anthropocene Project, a multidisciplinary investigation into human impact on the planet. The Anthropocene Project debuts this fall with simultaneous museum exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada, a feature-length documentary film, and a book.

The works on view demonstrate what Burtynsky calls the “indelible human signature” on the planet, caused by incursions into the landscape on an industrial scale. Chronicling the major themes of terraforming and extraction, urbanisation and  deforestation, Burtynsky conveys the unsettling reality of sweeping resource depletion and extinction.

In these photographs, taken from both aerial and subterranean perspectives, and presented at a large scale, the patterns and scars of human-altered landscapes appear to form an abstracted painterly language.  From the graduating tonal grids of turquoise and green-gold formed by the expansive lithium extraction ponds on the salt flats of the  Atacama desert, to psychedelic fossil-like whorls formed by anthroturbation (human tunnelling) within the potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains, they reference the sublime and often surreal qualities of human mark-making.