Beautiful Destruction - Alberta Tar Sands Aerial Photographs

Helbig’s aerial images are situated between documention and abstraction. The tension between their beauty and what they represent – the man-made alteration and destruction of a landscape – stimulates thought and imagination. The Alberta tar sands are a place of superlatives where further exaggeration of scale and proportion seems impossible. This topical, award winning and critically acclaimed exhibition is the result of a cross-country flight the photographer and his partner made in their 1946 aircraft.