The main exhibition now at Exit Art brings together all you could want in a show depicting the landscape in ruins. Ecoaesthetic: The Tragedy of Beauty presents work by nine photographers for whom terra firma is a battleground, taking the position that the tragic outcome of human actions - environmental degradation through deforestation, industry, and war, for example - becomes the aesthetic of the landscape image.

Several familiar series are on view, including work by Edward Burtynsky (Oil), Sze Tsung Leong (History Images), David Maisel (Terminal Mirage), and Mitch Epstein (American Power). With these images, Exit Art creates an informative setting to introduce a few less familiar photographers working along the same vein. Among them are Jo Syz (strip mining), Anthony Hamboussi (Illegal Settlements, Cairo), and Susannah Sayler/The Canary Project, whose 20-foot-long print of Mirror (Antarctica), 2008 delineates the west wall of the gallery.

Left: Anthony Hamboussi, Remains of the former Pepsi-Cola Bottling Plant, 46-00 5th Street, Long Island City, Queens, Looking West, 2001-2006. Right: Susannah Sayler/The Canary Project, Adaptation and Mitigation LIX: Water Storage, Lake Paron, Peru, 2008. Copyright and courtesy the artists.

A savvy companion show is Consume, a project of SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetcs) in which mullti-media artists take on the subject of industrial food production, distribution, consumption, and waste. Exit Art is also presenting a series of public talks, screenings and workshops that take up diverse food-related issues.

Ecoaesthetic: The Tragedy of Beauty and Consume continue at Exit Art through August 28^th. 475 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY. 212.966.7745. Please visit the website for information about the exhibitions and public programs.

The artists in ECOAESTHETIC: The Tragedy of Beauty are Edward Burtynsky (Canada); Mitch Epstein (USA); Anthony Hamboussi (USA); Chris Jordan (USA); Christopher LaMarca (USA); Sze Tsung Leong (USA); David Maisel (USA); Susannah Sayler/The Canary Project (USA) and Jo Syz (UK).

CONSUME features work by Prayas Abhinav (India); Elizabeth Demaray (USA); Jon Feinstein (USA); Jordan Geiger / Ga-Ga and Virginia San Fratello / Rael-San Fratello Architects (USA); Sara Heitlinger and Franc Purg (UK/Slovenia); Manny Howard (USA); Miwa Koizumi (USA); Tamara Kostianovsky (USA); Robin Lasser (USA); Lenore Malen (USA); Mark Lawrence Stafford (USA); Laurie Sumiye (USA); Andreas Templin (Germany); and Uli Westphal (Germany).

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