Brightest Young Things

all photos: Dustin Lilley (make sure to click on them to enlarge the small ones)
all words: Svetlana

Continuing their absolutely stellar photography exhibition tradition Corcoran is opening Edward Burtynsky's "OIL" show tomorrow. Curated by Paul Roth (who previously brought you the Avedon, Adams and Sally Mann exhibits and is obviously living the photo curatorial wet dream) it is a series of 56 large scale photographs representing (one man's) story of OIL.

This past Wednesday the gallery hosted a press preview which, in my opinion, was one of the most amazing things I've seen all year. Burtynsky was on hand to talk about how "it was difficult to find a way to approach this subject, because if everything is ok, OIL is something that we should never see. It is like the blood in our veins, it should always be contained, just doing its job. If you see it-there is a problem" and the resulting work (which took 12 years to create and is absolutely stunning in both scope and technique) represents a virtual narrative in the life cycle of oil:
-the process in which it is discovered/refined...
-the user sequence (featuring everything from completely hypnotic views of a Kiss concert parking lot to Talladega raceways)
-to the death of oil (the spills, the recycling, the...)
while still understanding that the story that is trying to be told is, quite literally, larger than life, and can never be told in its entirety.

Burtynsky also mentioned how excited he is to have this show in Washington, merely blocks away from the White House, giving this a contextual gravitas that a piece of work like this really needs.

If you see one photo show this year-let this be it. It doesn't matter if you're a fan of Burtynsky, landscape photography, an environmentalist, a lobbyist or just a passerby-there is a lot of something for everyone here.

Burtynsky's OIL opens tomorrow (October 3rd) and closes on December 13th.
The artist will be on hand on Saturday, at 4pm, along with Dr.William Rees to speak about his work (something you don't want to miss)
For all further details go here: http://www.corcoran.org/burtynsky/