Wes Bell, “Snag - Trans-Canada Highway, Redcliff, AB, Canada,” 2016
gelatin silver print, 14.6″ x 14.6″ (courtesy of artist)
Alberta photographer Wes Bell has found himself in esteemed company – including Canadian artists Edward Burtynsky and Warren Cariou – in an upcoming international exhibition in Wolfsburg, Germany.
"Being invited to be included alongside some of the most accomplished contemporary visual artists in the world is an honour that I'm over the moon about," says Bell. "I'm thrilled to be able to experience it."
The show, Oil. Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age, opens Sept. 4. It's billed as a retrospective on the ramifications of the “petrol age,” or the past 100 years of oil extraction. It's on view until Jan. 9 at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
The show includes work by an impressive array of international artists such as Christo, Hans Haacke, Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Bell is an Albertan artist who spent 30 years as a fashion photographer in Milan and New York before turning to visual art.
His series, Snag, haunting photographs of plastic bags snagged on barbed wire fences, is included in the show.
The work was not intended to have an overtly environmental message as they were a way for Bell to process his mother's terminal illness and death. But he says the exhibition's curatorial team was attracted to “the melancholy in the images” and the fact they came from Alberta, the hub of Canada's oil and gas industry.
Burtynsky is a Toronto-based, world-renowned photographer who has dedicated his career to taking photos of landscapes ravaged by industry. His aerial shots are both disturbing and beautiful.
Cariou is a Winnipeg-based writer and artist who teaches in the English department at the University of Manitoba. He creates “petrographs,” using a process he developed using bitumen, which is photosensitive, to create a contact print on a metal plate. The images he creates are made of the very tar sands he pictures.