Lake and Burtynsky are both cognizant and attentive to power relations. Their works are metaphors of conflicts which are meaningful to the individual and, for both artists, social and political conditions consistently relate back to the personal. The human body, specifically the female body, is Lake's locus of attention in examining these terms of reference. Burtynsky relates his identity and by extension his viewers, as like-minded consumers, to the landscape, particularly the industrially-defined landscape.

Ed Burtynsky - "Westar Open Pit Coal Mine #19, Sparwood, British Columbia", 1985, Edition 6/10, Chromogenic colour print, 26 1/2 x 33 3/4 in.

The selection of Burtynsky's photographs in this exhibition is drawn from his series entitled Mines, Railcuts, and Homesteads. After completing a degree in multimedia at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, these are among the subjects he examined during trips to western Canada in 1983, and again in 1985. Burtynsky formed this body of images to convey the means by which humans claimed a vast geographic territory in an extraordinarily brief period of time, in geological terms. By focussing on the rail, industry, and homes, the photographs mimetically structure Burtynsky's view of our tripartite encroachment on the land: transportation, mechanization, and domestication.
Burtynsky's fascination with large-scale industry began growing up in St. Catharines, Ontario. There, at a young age, he went to engine and frame plants and witnessed the production of motor vehicles first hand. As a teenager, he worked a press for truck frames and at twenty years of age he mined gold underground for six months at Red Lake, in Northern Ontario.

At the same time, through a friend who mined iron-ore, Burtynsky saw open-pit mining. Burtynsky then utilized his affinity for industries which form the core of Canada's resource-based economy to reestablish a link between himself, his viewers, and the activities which support his and their lifestyles. He seeks to reconnect us with the places we inhabit and the products we have. Burtynsky believes that "We don't really know what the 'other' of that is, or what the effect of that is on the landscape…I want to go back and show those kinds of places, in a kind of poetic way. I'm saying 'Isn't this interesting' and 'This speaks about those places we don't usually inhabit, we don't usually go to.'"
Burtynsky's technical proficiency with a large-scale view camera creates intense images ripe with evocative detail. In Mines #19, Westar Open Pit Coal Mine, Sparwood, British Columbia (1985), he encapsulates mining a seam, a practice which was technically possible only after the company had invested ten years to remove the rock of the mountain and expose this resource. The numerous layers of discarded rock parallel the strata of meaning this activity has for Burtynsky. The scale of the mine in the midst of a natural landscape reciprocates the scale of urban construction and the sense of awe he felt on first encountering the vast skyscrapers in downtown Toronto. But this subject also instills in Burtynsky a sense of anxiety, akin to the majestic and overwhelming scale of the sublime.
Reexamining notions of the sublime from landscape paintings of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Burtynsky believes the only thing we have to fear now is ourselves. "Sublime, in the past, was often man against nature, fear the forces of nature. This is the industrial sublime, We are dwarfed by our own works. So, the fearful thing is our works…We are dwarfed within our own progress." Burtynsky is aware of the uncanny quality of his works and he utilizes the attraction-repulsion impulses of both himself and his viewers to build tension in to the images. Of this work and others, he says "It has a seductive veneer, but if you push past the veneer you start asking, you should start asking some interesting questions about why am I looking at this? What is being shown here?"

Similar questions arise in Railcuts #6, Railcut off Hwy 8. Spences Bridge, British Columbia, for which Burtynsky utilized a reductive, modernist aesthetic comparable to Lake's formulation of A True Space. By ordering the objects in this landscape, Burtynsky restricted the referent to an engineered line which seems subtly placed on the perpendicular face of the mountain. He shows how humans have interjected and entered, like a puncture in the midst of a sublime landscape. Even so, we are compellingly decentered from any sense of scale. The presence of a train or telephone poles in other Railcuts in the series solidifies our sense of human activity in a setting which could initially be read as pure nature. Yet, Burtynsky does not attempt to use his photographs to implicate viewers in the traditionally combative discourse between humans and nature. He suggests we co-exist and that this is a natural manifestation of our identity, linked to the inevitability of progress and culture.
Burtynsky's interest in the impact of humans on the land pre-dates much of the environmental activism which informs how many viewers now respond to his images. The works are not rooted in environmentalist ideology, rather they are, in part, a means of creating an understanding of how industries function and vacillate between construction and deconstruction, resulting in a tension among created objects and the natural landscape. Burtynsky states clearly "I don't put the work out as politically active work, trying to make change through the showing of images. What I'm more interested in is that I'm trying to find images that can function and speak more about our process of progress and the scale they've reached. Then, to put the work out there as politically generated and motivated is to, I think, undercut the other meanings that exist within the work."
Burtynsky realgins our focus in his Homestead works, such as Homestead #27, Crow's Nest, British Columbia. Here, he expands our range of vision to include the raw land of the mountain, the activities of the mining company, and the town and its activities, which are structured, largely, as they relate back to the land and mine.