In the Wake of Progress, 2022

In the Wake of Progress is an immersive 22-minute multimedia, multiscreen installation of pictures from Burtynsky’s entire corpus. It was presented as part of Toronto’s annual Luminato Festival and coordinated across all twenty-two electronic billboards in Yonge-Dundas Square. Sound was provided by outdoor concert-grade speakers, with an evocative score by composer and sound designer Phil Strong and haunting vocals performed by Indigenous singer iskwē. The event was co-produced by rock music impresario Bob Ezrin.

At sixty-five, Burtynsky had a long and rich career behind him, marked by decades of technical refinement and a sustained commitment to exploring art’s possibilities for social relevance. The retrospective turn prompted by the conditions of pandemic confinement, crystallized in the Natural Order series, is extended by In the Wake of Progress, where recent high-resolution digital imaging and large-scale projection enabled Burtynsky to move beyond the single photographic frame to orchestrate an immersive environment integrating moving image, sound, and photography. The result is a cross-disciplinary form that amplifies both the visual impact of his work and its engagement with global systems of industry.

Through editing, Burtynsky turns his still images into a public spectacle of moving pictures that report on the impact our species has had on its habitat. Like in Anthropocene, the work is more explicitly didactic than was typical for an artist who has gradually relaxed the earlier distinction he made between art and activism. Following the initial presentation in Toronto, In the Wake of Progress was shown again in its outdoor form in Sydney, Australia, and adapted for indoor presentation in London (England), Mestre (Italy), and Montreal, in conjunction with his 2024 career survey Burtynsky: Extraction/Abstraction.

Multi-screen video projection with sound is a well-established medium in contemporary art. It is unusual, however, to encounter it outdoors on giant commercial supports facing a major urban square. It is just as unusual to see a career survey presented as an example of video art; you might even say that the work amounts to a hybrid form of “auto-fiction.” But here is where Burtynsky’s thematic rigour pays dividends. The coherence of the successive images that form In the Wake of Progress confirm the coherence of the whole career.