Winner of the 2025 Burtynsky Grant, Matthew Poburyny's project Divided Heart aims to explore the artist’s complicated emotions entrenched in the mundane routine experience of working a dead-end job to make ends meet in a world that feels increasingly divisive, and where what was once the promise of past generations rests upon the new like a decaying corpse of capitalism.

Jury statement: "Matthew Poburyny comes from a musical background, which he has successfully translated into his photographic practice. Featuring images he made while living and working along the Decarie Expressway (a trench highway located in Montreal’s West End), Divided Heart uses a musical rhythm and structure to place the viewer in a perhaps familiar world of repetition, failure, humour, and unlikely beauty.