Art in the night sky

I've just come home from seeing a great installation of art at the Cube Gallery, an unusual sort of place. Here's a short video showing the owner, Don Monet, setting it up. He hosts fund raisers for Doctors Without Borders at his gallery, letting the space be used by dancers and musicians as well as artists. He met several of us today to talk about the art on show, which all relates to the sky at night; Mr. Monet is an amateur astronomer as well as an artist, but what he is most proud of, apparently, is a book he wrote about a Supreme Court case, entitled Colonialism on Trial. It includes his sketches of the native defendants in court.

One of the artists whose work is on display in the current exhibition is an Ojibwa man, Mark Seabrook, whose work is like Norval Morriseau's. Another artist, the reason for our being there—because his mother organised our outing!—is another Marc, Marc Brzustowski. (Click on his picture above, as well!)

After an hour looking round and asking questions we all (over a dozen of us, I didn't count) had lunch a couple of blocks away at the rather stylish Canvas Resto-Bar.

So as not to forget some of the details, I am adding more to this post ...

I learned that when "Tommy" Thomson made his famous sketches of nightscapes he was careful to copy the constellations accurately. Don Monet approves of the fact that his fellow artist Marc Brzustowski does this as well. Some of Marc's night scenes show the moon, fragmented over the Rideau Canal locks, for instance. Another artist, Jessica Sarrazin, depicts the constellations, asterisms rather, as silver beads joined with lines of gold thread, sewn onto a photo of the night sky with a landscape silhouetted below. Some of Don Monet's own paintings are of what he sees through a telescope, a large one of the moon done on a board, the bare plywood being the right base colour. He claims that no other animal is physically able to gaze at the sky as we do (but I dispute this, having observed cats look up at the moon). He also did an oil painting of the transit of the earth's shadow during an eclipse: a series of moons, trying to capture the exact colours. He also painted the sudden, dazzling appearance of a comet over his garden, including the face of a friend in this picture who had missed the drama because he wasn't quick enough to look up at the right moment.

Some pieces in the show were more abstract, an attempt to capture the swirl of colours that astronomers observe from long exposures through the lens of the Hubble telescope, for example. John Ceprano, the man who makes art from stones found in the Ottawa River, has created canvasses which are comments on light pollution. Amy Schissel has produced a four-panel wall in many colours that represents the depths of space. Another Ottawa artist, Garry Bowes, has carved beautiful tributes to the shape of radio telescopes in dark wood and an elm vase painted with the colours of the Orion Nebula, with shining crystals inserted into the wood, and Andrew and Deb O'Malley have devised light boxes in which an ingenious arrangement of coloured LEDs and mirrors give the illusion of the depths of space, inspired by the three stars in Orion's belt.

I still haven't mentioned everything. Go and look if you can. The exhibition runs until June 28th.