Photo Credit: Daniel Boyd, History is Made at Night, installation view, 2013. Photo: Zan Wimberley. Courtesy of the artist, Carriageworks, and Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery, Sydney.
How do you gain a new point of view on something you’ve looked at your whole life? As Star Witnesses (on now until September 28) at Polygon Gallery shows, fresh insight often comes not necessarily from finding definitive answers but by asking new questions that you know will remain unsolved.
An exhibition of nine pieces from a collection of international artists, this North Shore show brings together multimedia works that ponder the depth of the cosmos and the deeper meaning that comes with looking into a view that stretches to forever. However technical that may sound, the pieces here are less about the honed numbers of astronomy and more about absorbing the meandering expanse of the unknown.
Using fragments of found and newly produced photographic evidence, the artists present planets, moons, and distant galaxies to not only ask questions of what else (and who else) is out there, but also address concerns closer to home.
Through mediums like photography, video projection, and sculpture, the show asks questions about our relation to space and how the night sky can be viewed as a reflection of our own lives as we drift between each other like grounded satellites.
Just as no two views from Earth are the same, the visions of Star Witnesses show that there are infinite ways to interpret something that we’ve gazed at so many times, it may have lost its shine.
Participating artists: Daniel Boyd, Vija Celmins, David Horvitz, Bouchra Khalili, Judy Radul, Thomas Ruff, Carrie Mae Weems, Urban Subjects (Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, and Helmut Weber), Paul Wong.
Star Witnesses runs from June 27 to September 28, 2025
For more information, visit thepolygon.ca