Opening on Friday, October 28th

Edward Burtynsky: African Studies

Opening reception with the artist on October 28th from 6:00-8:00pm

"With this project, I hope to continue raising awareness about the cost of growing our civilization without the necessary consideration for sustainable industrial practices and the dire need for implementing globally organized governmental initiatives, with binding international legislations, in order to protect present and future generations from what stands to be forever lost."
- Edward Burtynsky

Weinstein Hammons Gallery is pleased to present African Studies, an exhibition of fourteen large format photographs by the internationally renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. This will be Burtynsky's third solo exhibition with the gallery and is the debut of African Studies in the United States.

Since the early 1980’s, Burtynsky’s work has depicted large-scale industrial projects and their effects on the environment, telling a comprehensive visual story of human alteration. This ambitious project, seven years in the making, is inspired by the arc themes of Burtynsky’s career: extractions, agriculture, and urbanization, this time shot exclusively across the second largest continent in the world, Africa. Alongside images of the extractive industries which impact nature and all life, the exhibition also includes a selection of unaltered landscapes, which provide a strong visual contrast to the images of human impact. African Studies features photographs taken at resource mines in South Africa and Botswana, salt ponds in Senegal, lakes and tea farms in Kenya, sulfur springs in Ethiopia, and the Namib Desert in Namibia. 

Using high technology equipment such as fixed-wing aircrafts, helicopters and drones, Burtynsky creates otherworldly landscape images that border between realism and abstraction. Overlapping exposures, seamlessly stitched together, provide compelling scene detail not visible to the naked eye. As the human-induced rapid environmental change continues, Burtunsky’s work remains more relevant than ever. 

Edward Burtynsky’s photographic depictions of industrialized landscapes are included in the collections of over fifty museums around the world, including: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; the National Gallery of Canada, Toronto; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; Reina Sofia, Madrid; and the Los Angeles Museum of Art. 

A new book of the same name published by Steidl will also be released this fall.

On the occasion of the openings of Edward Burtynsky’s new series African Studies Burtynsky and his gallerists are committing 100% of the earnings from the first 39” x 52” print sold at each show — equalling CAD $100,000.00 — to LagosPhoto. They will work with LagosPhoto to establish a new program within the Festival dedicated to emerging and mid-career African artists who are focussing their lens on subjects of globalism, and the environmental, cultural and social impacts of the climate crisis on the Global South.