Sublime Industry and Risky Aesthetics: A Comparison of Edward Burtynsky’s OIL and Karen Solie’s “Bitumen” Karen Solie’s poem “Bitumen” (2015) and Edward Burtynsky’s photography collection OIL (2009) both question the adequacy of sublime aesthetics as a representational mode for depicting the effects of industry. I will explore how the oil industry is represented as sublime in Burtynsky’s OIL and the critical and ironic distance this representation requires. Informing this will be historical theorizations of the sublime as well as current theories, such as Frederic Jameson’s postmodern sublime. I argue, Burtynsky’s use of the sublime in OIL raises questions about why we have great difficulty understanding spaces that are foundational to contemporary
