Exhibition · Bau-Xi Gallery · Other
Richard Barnes | The Marble Mountain: Extraction and the Sublime Inaugural Solo Exhibition in Vancouver November 7-28, 2026 Main Gallery 3045 Granville Street Opening reception: Saturday, November 7, 2-4 pm | Artist in Attendance Bau-Xi Vancouver is proud to announce The Marble Mountain: Extraction and the Sublime, the inaugural solo exhibition in Vancouver by award-winning New York based photographer Richard Barnes. This body of work is an examination of the sobering effects of long-term resource extraction, as well as a timely questioning of the role of robotics and AI in the realm of art reproduction and cultural consumption, captured in a series of astonishingly beautiful images. Artist Statement: For the past few years I have been photographing in the quarries of northern Italy. As a photographer focused on the built environment, my work in the quarries emerges from a deep interest in land use and mineral extraction. The Apuan Alps which straddle both northern Tuscany and Liguria have been mined, exploited, and industrialized for over two thousand years, all to supply the world with one of the most exquisite strains of pure white stone, often simply referred to as Carrara marble. To say that this landscape has been scoured and abraded, sometimes beyond recognition, would be an understatement. In addition to this environmental degradation I have also turned my attention to the workshops and sculpture studios that are currently undergoing profound transformation in terms of new tools employed in the carving of marble into sculpture using digital and robotic technologies. On a macro level, looking through an art historical lens, my images of the quarries depict what might be considered the largest and longest-running land art project ever conceived. At the same time, it represents the environmental degradation of an entire ecosystem, the cumulative effect of centuries of relentless extraction. On a micro level, my work focuses on a specific strain of Carrara…