Martin Art Gallery Presents "Displacement" Photos By Burtynsky And Vergara
Monday, February 2, 2004 01:21 PM
The Martin Art Gallery presents an exhibit of two important and influential contemporary photographers, Canadian Edward Burtynsky and New York-based Camilo Jose Vergara. "Displacement" will open Wednesday, February 4, and run through April 9. The Gallery is located in the Baker Center for the Arts, Muhlenberg College. Gallery hours are Wednesday-Saturday, 12 noon-9 p.m. For more information, visit www.muhlenberg.edu/cultural/gallery or call 484-664-3467.
With interests related to the College's current programming on the theme of sustainability and the Martin Art Gallery's dedication to interdisciplinary exhibitions, this show focuses on Burtynsky and Vergara's need to examine complex and often troubling issues of land use and social disruption. Their approaches are unflinching, and they produce works that are at once devastating and haunting, poignant and serene. The exhibition is guest curated by Joseph E. B. Elliott, professor of art.
Working with the methodical detachment of surveyors, Edward Burtynsky and Camilo Jose Vergara study landscapes ranging from the American and Canadian west to the ruins of Camden, New Jersey and the Yangtze River Valley of China. Burtynsky's monumental prints examine landscapes of displacement such as mine sites, oil fields, and the three Gorges dam inundation in China--a print that is a new addition to the College's permanent art collection.
For thirty years, Vergara has meticulously observed the transformation of America's inner cities into urban ruins, their earlier populations displaced by changing economies, the proliferation of highways and suburbs, and racial tensions. The works of both photographers imply the question: Is life sustainable considering the natural and social ecologies being upturned and displaced by social, political and economic forces?
The works of both artists are not merely polemics, indicting the perpetrators of industrial exploitation and shortsighted urban policy. They are also meditations on the complex interactions within and between human and natural ecologies, and on the unlikely beauties that emerge from prolonged, sensitive study.
Burtynsky makes elegiac, impeccable images of environmental upheaval. In the new Burtynsky now in Muhlenberg's collection called "Three Gorges Dam, Yangtze River, China, 2003," time seems to "fast forward" as a city crumbles before our eyes in advance of the rising waters of China's Three Gorges Dam. Millions of people must leave their homes, cities are literally displaced and centuries of culture submerged by a questionable "leap forward" in technological sophistication and capacity. In the North American west, countless tons of earth are displaced in the quest for copper while oil is forced from the ground and sent streaming across the landscape in networks of pipes.
Vergara asks us to watch the unfolding social, cultural, economic, and ecological transformations and displacements that take place in American cities such as New York, Chicago, Detroit, and in this exhibit, Camden, N.J. Where many see nothing but desolate slums that should be cleared or gentrified, Vergara examines his environments more carefully, resisting judgment in favor of understanding history, architecture, and cultural and natural adaptations to changing conditions. Appalled by damage and loss that has been inflicted on the neighborhoods, Vergara sees them as complex social organisms undergoing transition. Remnants of the old order remain in ruins of finely crafted buildings, nature reasserts itself in vacant lots or urban gardens, and people armor their homes and businesses to cope with conditions that are increasingly harsh. Vergara even proposes that downtown Detroit be designated an official ruin, a monument to an earlier age.
Edward Burtynsky and Camilo Vergara represent a movement of socially and environmentally conscious photographers. Their photographs are records of complex and subtle examinations, residing at the intersections of art and information, architecture and landscape, ecology and history. They ask us to think carefully as we make choices about the future of social and natural environments.
