There's a fundamental contradiction between the theme of The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video, now on view at the Ryerson Image Centre, and the works it exhibits. This inconsistency can be found in most politically engaged art and can be summed up as the irresolvable divide between practical measures and speculative expressions. In this case, it is the unquestionable certainty of our endangered environment that is at odds with the ambiguity of the art intended to represent it. A prominent example of this (that also happens to be included in the exhibition) is the work of Edward Burtynsky. The local photographer has built his career on tightly framing gorgeous scenes of humanity's impact on the planet in a way that is undeniably real, but manages to drift into abstraction, thus allowing for an aesthetic consideration of what are often scenes of environmental devastation. At the other end of the spectrum are the images in the exhibition drawn from the gallery’s Black Star collection of photojournalism; these pictures clearly document the state of the world but fall into the shadow of the more spectacular contemporary art works. 
Hicham Berrada, Celeste, 2014, HD video
The most memorable works in this wide-ranging exhibition are those that make dramatic statements. In that way they manage to effectively illustrate the immediacy of the threats to our environment while remaining open to other interpretations in other contexts. Naoya Hatakeyama's photographs of exploding rocks are nothing if not blatant reminders of the inevitable end of our self-perpetuated self-destruction, though they could also capture the dynamism of any system in flux. The toxic blue smoke that billows outside a country house window in Hicham Berrada’s video Celeste is clearly an evocation of air pollution and its limitless spread, though it might also be a formless sculpture caught in mid-reverie. Raymond Boisjoly’s unfixed contact prints of reservation gas stations are ghostly Venn diagrams overlapping environmental, aboriginal, colonial, corporate, and photographic histories, while Gideon Mendel’s series The Drowning World is Biblical, Apocalyptic, a document of current events, and straightforward portraiture all at once. 
Chris Jordan, CF000478: Unaltered stomach contents of Laysan albatross fledgling, Midway Island, 2009, Ultrachrome Inkjet print
Paul Walde's Requiem for a Glacier succeeds in getting the sublime to effect real world change (the video contributed to the halting of a development project), but when it comes down to the undeniable, inexcusable, abhorrent, and objective truth of how fucked things really are, I defy anyone to find Chris Jordan's photographs of the plastic packed guts of bird corpses beautiful or manage to turn away from them. The horror of these images – a living creature with the blessing of flight brought down by manufactured junk that will be our century's epitaph because it will outlast us all – is all the more galling because it implicates every single one of us. There is no ambiguity here, only a tragedy arising from low stakes crap that no one needed in the first place. If the role of art is not simply to reflect the world, but to change the way we think about it, then these pictures do the job and prove it’s possible to be both raw and resonant.
Ryerson Image Centre: http://www.ryerson.ca/ric/
The Edge of the Earth: Climate Change in Photography and Video continues until December 4.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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The Edge of the Earth at the Ryerson Image Centre
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