The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto is now hosting a riveting multi-media art exhibition that invites the public to an ongoing scientific debate with potentially life-determining implications for humanity.
The exhibition, Anthropocene, takes its title from a proposal by an international group of scientists to rename our current geological epoch. The existing name, the “Holocene,” covers the past 11,000+ years of earth’s history, beginning with the retreat of the last glaciers and the extinction of the mammoths. The scientists posit this label has become outdated. They suggest we have entered a new geological time in which, for the first time in earth’s estimated 4.6 billion year history, humans now change the earth’s systems more than all natural forces combined. The scientists propose to call this new epoch the “Anthropocene” or “Human” epoch (from the ancient Greek anthropos for “human” and cene for “new”).
Anthropocene examines the evidence for the scientists’ proposal through a series of stunningly beautiful photographs supplemented by films and augmented reality (AR) installations. Featured artworks reveal human activity in every continent except Antarctica and include forty mural and large-scale photographs by internationally acclaimed photographer Edward Burtynsky and seven short films by award-winning Toronto filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier.
Edward Burtynsky, Coal Mine #1, North Rhine, Westphalia, Germany, 2105. Pigment inkjet print. Dimensions: 58 1⁄2” x 78.” © Edward Burtynsky, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.
The artists caution their work is not intended to propose answers or lay blame. Instead, they simply pose questions, theorizing that visitors may supply better answers than the artists could imagine. This humility gives the exhibition its power – and its potential to catalyze solutions. As the artists astutely observe, “The shifting of consciousness is the beginning of change.”
The Art Gallery of Ontario is one of North America’s largest art museums with a collection of nearly 95,000 artworks. Yet the Gallery recognizes that this exhibition will kindle a global conversation bigger than the confines of any single institution. So the Gallery is partnering for the first time with the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa to create a complementary Anthropocene exhibition at that institution. The Toronto Gallery is also sponsoring a multi-episode podcast, Into the Anthropocene, hosted by storyteller and activist Sarain Fox. The podcast, which features interviews with scientists, writers, artists, poets, professors and activists, is available free online.
The Toronto Anthropocene exhibition continues through Jan. 6, 2019. The related Ottawa exhibition continues through Feb. 24, 2019. Both are supplemented by a series of lectures, including, most notably, an interview with the three featured artists on Wed., Nov. 21, 2018 at the Toronto gallery.
