Before the statue comes the hole in the mountain. Richard Barnes photographs both the Carrara quarries and the workshops where robots carve the stone. The Marble Mountain: Extraction and the Sublime, his first Vancouver solo exhibition, puts those stages back together. We are accustomed to admiring what comes out of a quarry. The hole gets considerably less wall space.
Barnes began photographing the area on a National Geographic assignment about the return of cultural objects. In a gallery interview, he recalls encountering a robot carving a scanned fragment of the Parthenon sculptures. A proposed replica of an object disputed by two countries had become a machine’s job. He returned to make a longer project, following the stone from the mountain into the workshop.
Quarry Interior in Orange and Black and The Measured Mountain, both from 2025, appear alongside Space Man (F. Tincolini) in Process from 2022. The exhibition places the extraction site beside the workshop object. That pairing makes it harder to consider the finished sculpture without also considering what has been removed from the mountain to produce it.
Barnes asks what happens when carving is delegated to a machine unable to respond to a fault in the stone as a sculptor might. It is a question about decisions during the work, as well as authorship afterwards. Seeing the robot with the quarry gives both questions a physical setting. The exhibition runs at Bau-Xi Vancouver, 3045 Granville Street, through November 28, 2026.