WATER features Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky’s exploration of humanity’s increasingly stressed relationship with the world’s most vital natural resource. Between 2007 and 2012, Burtynsky travelled the globe, from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of the Ganges, crafting an ambitious representation of water’s increasingly fragmented lifecycle. In enormous, color prints Burtynsky’s aerial images trace 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 rituals, and as a rapidly depleting resource. Sometimes elegant, sometimes haunting, the abstract pictures 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 relationship with the natural world.
July 1, 2016
