Amid the Ruins: Contemporary Landscape Photography from the Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery

March 4, 2006 to July 9, 2006

Organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, Saskatchewan Arts Board and City of Regina Arts Commission.

The Three Gorges Dam in China is a project of unparalleled scale, visable even from space. While promising to control flooding on the Yangtze River, the immediate effect of the project was to displace several million people. Whole cities were first evacuated and then dismantled, brick by brick, to make way for the dam. These government-created ruins were the subject of a recent series of photographs by Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky, one of which was recently purchased by the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

Ruins have been a subject in Western art since the Renaissance discovered the appeal of Rome's fallen splendour. Increasingly, though, it is the discarded remains of our own, modern industrial society that have been the source of inspiration. This exhibition of photography from the MacKenzie Art Gallery's collection reflects on this subject through the work of seven artists: Roy Arden, Edward Burtynsky, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Angela Grauerholz, Geoffrey James and the N.E. Thing Co.

Underlying many of the images, which range from the wastelands of suburban sprawl to the lunar landscape left by a mine, is a questioning of what we call beautiful. Why are artists attracted to these marginal spaces, the untidy corners of our long-awaited technological utopia? These images, taken amid the ruins of the new world order, raise questions which disturb our comfortable assumptions about landscape, progress and the aesthetic.

Image Credit:

Edward Burtynsky
Three Gorges Dam Project, Wan Zhou # 1, 2002
chromogenic print, edition 1/5
101.6 x 127 cm
Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery, purchased with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program

Amid the Ruins: Contemporary Landscape Photography from the Collection of the MacKenzie Art Gallery

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