A TERRIBLE BEAUTY
Edward Burtynsky in Dialogue with Emily Carr
Central Gallery
October 18 to December 31, 2014
Curated by Bruce Grenville, Vancouver Art Gallery
A Terrible Beauty offers a selection of photographs by Toronto-based photographer Edward Burtynsky, who is internationally renowned for his captivating images of natural and built environments that reflect both the impressive reach of human enterprise and the extraordinary impact of our hubris. Produced between 1983 and 2013, the photographs in A Terrible Beauty together represent all of his major bodies of work, from his early series of homestead photographs shot in British Columbia in the 1980s to his new, groundbreaking project on the subject of water and its fundamental place in the world ecology.
Burtynsky’s work is presented in dialogue with a smaller selection of paintings and drawings by Emily Carr, an artist who likewise observed the impact of human industry on the natural world in some of her best-known works. Carr was painting in the early 20th century at a time when industrialized agriculture, resource extraction and practices such as large-scale logging in British Columbia were on the rise. Many of Carr’s sweeping vistas of sky were views only made possible by the clear-cutting of the forest. Though working in different media and over fifty years apart, both artists sought to record the changing, industrialized landscape and our place within it.
A Terrible Beauty: Edward Burtynsky in Dialogue with Emily Carr is organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery with the generous support of the Killy Foundation.
Installation view of Terrible Beauty
Edward Burtynsky in Dialogue with Emily Carr
Photo: Kamloops Art Gallery
