Moon rising under the Gardiner
U.K. artist’s scale model of Earth’s famed satellite to glow at Bentway this week
During her long tenure as host of CBC Radio’s late-night show The Signal, broadcaster Laurie Brown would often turn to the moon and its luminous presence.
“It doesn’t matter what your politics are. It doesn’t matter what your income bracket is. We’re listening to the radio and there’s a full moon outside,” she says. “Nighttime is kind of my gig, and the moon is just the most wonderful metaphor to lift us out of ourselves and into the bigger world.”
Brown is now part of the ground-control team who is bringing the astronomical body even closer to Torontonians. From Tuesday to Sunday, U.K. artist Luke Jerram’s The Museum of the Moon will arrive at the Bentway, the 1.75-kilometre public space and outdoor gallery located underneath the Gardiner Expressway, from Strachan Ave. to Bathurst St.
Last August, Brown became intrigued by photos of Jerram’s travelling inflatable sculpture that shone for 10 days over Tom Patterson Island, a lakeside park near downtown Stratford. The Museum of the Moon is a giant balloon, seven metres in diameter, built to 1:500,000 scale using NASA imagery, illuminated from the inside to provide an up-close view of the moon’s craters, dead volcanic cones and lava flows.
After visiting a smaller version of the sculpture that is currently hanging at the Aga Khan Museum until Wednesday, Brown was hooked on the idea of bringing Jerram’s work to an urban environment.
Brown approached Ilana Altman, co-executive director at the Bentway, with the idea of exhibiting The Museum of the Moon. The installation will float for six nights under the Gardiner, where visitors will have an opportunity to bathe in the replica moon’s glow.
This is the moon’s time to shine. The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing has reignited interest in the natural satellite after several years of being overshadowed by the prospect of travel to Mars, thanks to Elon Musk and other space-habitat speculators (Brown jokingly refers to the moon as a highway hotel on the road to Mars).
This year has brought dedicated documentaries, podcasts, books and merch such as glowing nightlights that use 3D printing to mimic the moon’s surface. Jerram says that thanks to the moon fever, more than a million visitors have visited the Natural History Museum in London since the installation opened there in May.
Jerram first started touring his lunar project in 2016. The Museum of the Moon has been blown up in many other locations around the world, witnessed by more than three million people in far-reaching locales such as Beijing, Milan and Dubai, and will continue touring with dates scheduled well into 2020. The installation has connected cool kids dancing to music in the fields of Glastonbury to festival-goers at the more staid Winter Lights Festival in Reykyavik, Iceland.
A few weeks ago, the Bristolborn artist — who recalls being entranced by the night sky as a kid — floated the moon on the docks of his southwest England hometown, which has one of the highest tidal ranges in the world. He first conceived of the project 15 years ago, but had to wait for NASA’s imagery data and printing technology to catch up to his idea of giving people an intimate but realistic experience of the moon. He always envisioned his work floating in a public space. He says the context changes depending on the cultural and physical environment, and that the Bentway’s raw downtown Toronto venue will be a first.
“I think there will be an interesting visual parallel between the stone-looking moon and the concrete of the bridge,” he says. Accompanying The Museum of the Moon is an atmospheric soundtrack composed by Jerram’s longtime collaborator, musician Dan Jones. In addition, each venue curates its own programming. For the Bentway, there will be moonlight meditation sessions and free astronomy talks at Fort York National Historic Site.
On Saturday, by the light of the fake silvery moon — when the real Harvest Moon will light up the sky — Brown is hosting a live taping of her podcast, Pondercast, with electronic musician Joshua Van Tassel, featuring a singalong with Choir! Choir! Choir!, a performance by Toronto jazz-pop outfit Bernice and a silent-disco set led by Halifax’s energetic dance impresario, Rich Aucoin.
“The centre of the idea is ‘How do we experience nature in the middle of a huge city?’ ” says Brown. “Sometimes it’s hard to see the universe and this much bigger world when you’re on the Bloor-Danforth line for a couple of hours a day.”