MN Marine Art Museum: Edward Burtynsky: "Water"

About

Over the course of five years, Canadian Edward Burtynsky (b. 1955) traveled across the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to the shore of the Ganges, while weaving together an ambitious representation of water’s ever more fragmented lifecycle. In colorful aerial images, many bordering on the edge of complete abstraction, Burtynsky traces the various roles that water plays in modern life; as a source of healthy ecosystems and energy, as a key element in cultural and religious ritual, and as a rapidly depleting resource.

Many of the images focus our attention not on water itself but on the systems that humans have put in place in order to harness it, shape it, and control it. Photographs of maze-like stepwells in India, massive dam construction and aquaculture in China, manufactured waterfront housing projects in Florida and irrigation systems in the American West are presented alongside parched landscapes, fried river regions, and ominously-colored salt and shrimp farms. Many of these photographs are Burtynsky’s most abstract images; pivot irrigation plots are carefully crafted into totemic arrangement of geometry and dryland farming fields are transformed into dizzying collections of biometric forms. These images, sometimes elegant, sometimes haunting, hover between the worlds of painting and photography, forming a compelling global portrait of water that functions as an open-ended question about humanity’s past, present, and future relationships with the natural world.

Edward Burtynsky: Water was organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art.