EDWARD BURTYNSKY at the Royal Ontario Museum (100 Queen’s Park) to July 3. $22, stu/srs $19 $11, half-price Friday 4:30-9:30 pm free Wednesday 4:30-5:30 pm. 416-586-8000. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Edward Burtynsky’s imposing studies of the oil economy are as austere as they are strikingly beautiful. Depersonalized, abstract, they function almost as schematics that demonstrate the terrifying logic of our energy economy at work. Images of the oil sands operation outside Fort McMurray or the receding geometry of oil fields in California convey the sense of an almost mystical process: the transformation of raw nature into energy and capital.
Working in the formal tradition of German industrial photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, Burtynsky is enacting a rigorous taxonomy of industrial form and process that’s as much an archival and conceptual project as it is a commentary on our dangerous oil dependency.
His conspicuous absence from these large-scale studies has been interpreted by some as a lack of engagement. That neutrality, however, is what leaves room for conversation even as the sheer scale of the problem renders us speechless.
