Realer Than Real
We scrap about 290 million tires every year. It’s one thing to say it, it’s another thing to see it. For his 1999 series Oil, photographer Edward Burtynsky captured scenes inside one facility using his signature large format (prints can be six feet long). The result was canyons of tires; massifs, peaks, and fells of tires; rolling extraterrestrial wastelands of melting rubber draped in thick oily smoke. It was staggering. But even more staggering, it was beautiful. Seeing Burtynsky’s images — the sanguine flows of nickel from Trailings or the haunting industrial skeletons in his Shipbreaking series — there is no doubt that Burtynsky is, first and foremost, a fine art photographer. But he is driven by a crusader’s heart to explore the impact of mankind’s propagation, making him a perfect recipient for this year’s Art/Act Award. The accompanying exhibit features Burtynsky’s latest: Water, which took him from the Deepwater Horizon spill to the stepwells of Rajasthan to the ghostly Salton Sea to the verdant polders of the Netherlands to the Yellow River Dam in China. The exhibit opens with a talk by Burtynsky and continues through the winter with a conference on land use, and concerts by Conspiracy of Beards and Rob Reich with Tin Hat Trio.
510-809-0900
