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 rob.i.am
       
Gender: Male
Carpe noctum
 |  |  | Star article: Burtynsky Factories
< on 2/3/2011 5:19 PM >
|  | | | Burtynsky brings his wide lens home
February 02, 2011
Peter Goddard
Driving along the QEW around Hamilton, en route to St. Catharines, you catch a glimpse in real time of what could be a classic Edward Burtynsky photograph.
Here’s the ragged skyline of old industrial Hamilton in winter, smoke frozen vertically in the sky, the slate grey harbour iced over. The only traces of colour visible on land are mostly a dull red, resembling ketchup mixed with mud. It’s a chilling scene.
You realize how long we’ve been used to responding to the slow, cool rage behind much of the Toronto artist’s work while seeing “Burtynsky Factories,” at Rodman Hall Art Centre in St. Catharines, where Burtynsky is having a reception Thursday.
Because “Burtynsky Factories” is different. It is neither angry nor particularly analytical. It evokes the humanity, not the exploitation, found in labour and mass production. It suggests that factories are living spaces as much as profit churners. In short, the exhibition has some of the least socially provocative work in Burtynsky’s 30-year-plus career.
We’ve long admired the intelligence Burtynsky brings to documenting environmental hazards caused by oil spills or the dumping of industrial waste. With this new suite of work — a paring down of some 16 images filmed in a General Motors and Dana Holding plants on July 1, 2009 — we find that his heart has led him to do some of his best work in years.
It’s a homecoming in a way, and it shows. The vertical rectangle created by a lone red door in Dana Frame Plant #2 (2010) is as snug a fit against stacked horizontal lines as a square in a Mondrian painting. Vivid yellow paint on metal steps looks more like hand-polished maple in a well-kept home. Gloomy recesses found inside factories suggest restfulness.
The images of the interiors of the factories — where the photographer worked putting himself through school in the early ’70s — also celebrate detail, as if the old plants were Baroque cathedrals, the artist evoking his own faith in their tumbledown majesty.
“The arc of my work until now has been about the expansion of the human footprint as we constantly expand and consume more and more of the landscape,” he says. “It’s not been about worker against management or left against right. It was more a lament for the loss of nature.”
But “Burtynsky Factories” also reads like a lament for his own lost past. A solitary Tim Hortons cup sits on the very table where he once had his own lunches. We know he went through that red door. “The buildings were faint shadows of what they were in the late ’70s,” he says. “It was kind of weird going back.”
After immigrating in 1951 from Ukraine, the Burtynsky family settled in St. Catharines, where Edward was born in 1955. His father — whose purchase of a darkroom led to his son’s interest in photography — worked on the General Motors production line. “He died relatively young, as many of the men there did,” says the artist. “The PCB oils used were highly carcinogenic.”
“We don’t appreciate labour in the capitalist world,” Burtynsky goes on. “I was a worker. The Dana plant was a hard place to work, making frames for cars and trucks. Its big form presses, 35 metres high, would tumble down, pressing the sheeting into the form of the frame. You’re moving tons and tons of steel per day. It was physically challenging. A lot of guys who were hired never made it through the second day. I worked there for seven months.”
Curated by Rodman director Shirley Madill, “Burtynsky Factories” was initiated by the building of Brock University’s new Faculty of Education.
The Faculty of Education “identified him as someone whose work they’d like in the new building,” says Madill. “People operating the plants were very generous in opening the plants. There is a real resonance here with the community.”
Lucky community. But for a stranger, finding Rodman Hall is not easy. St Catharines seemingly is the most sign-averse city on the planet. But Madill and company make it worth your time by buttressing “Burtynsky Factories” with some of the artist’s earlier work, including one image of rows and rows of workers on a Chinese assembly line.
Factory work-related ideas of repetition and serial production are also evident in the two exhibitions bracketing Burtynsky’s show. In “Honk If You Pay Throo The Schnozz,” Marc Bell’s compressed collages, sketchy drawing and mixed-media contraptions suggest a collaboration between Mad magazine and Mad Max. It was curated by Marcie Bronson, as was Micah Lexier’s “A Week at a Glance,” where one of several items located in a specially built vitrine is replaced dutifully each Monday by another Lexier-selected item. Bell’s show continues to May 1, Lexier’s until Jan. 1, 2012.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rob666/ |
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hilite
Gender: Male
don't destroy my sweater....
| | | Re: Star article: Burtynsky Factories
<Reply # 2 on 2/4/2011 1:33 AM >
| | | |
see! I'm not the only one to forget my camera and opt for my cell phone.
[last edit 2/4/2011 1:33 AM by hilite - edited 1 times]
And when you finally disappear, We'll just say you were never here. |
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rob.i.am
Gender: Male
Carpe noctum
| | | Re: Star article: Burtynsky Factories
<Reply # 3 on 2/4/2011 2:00 AM >
|  | | | Posted by HI-LITE
see! I'm not the only one to forget my camera and opt for my cell phone.
|
Hahahahaha!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rob666/ |
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Air
Location: Canada
| | Re: Star article: Burtynsky Factories
<Reply # 4 on 2/4/2011 2:33 AM >
| | | | Good to see mediocre images from him...it's quite humbling!
"The extraordinary beauty of things that fail." - Heinrich von Kleist |
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ZenCanadian
Location: High Park, Toronto
Gender: Male
| | Re: Star article: Burtynsky Factories
<Reply # 5 on 2/4/2011 3:15 AM >
| | | | Stellar! .......Not!
Zen and the art of infiltration...
http://www.flikr.com/photos/zenslens
Zen is an uber explorer, a demi god of craning and purveyor of the finer things in life. |
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