Seeking meaning, from Earth to stars

As summer days unfold into warm humid nights, we’ve made our way outside and turned our eyes upward. We’ve looked to the northwest and picked out the Big Dipper, using it to point our way to a rare glimpse of the comet Neowise. To the southeast, Saturn and Jupiter have been together in the sky — an event that occurs only every 20 years, when their orbits align. A collaboration, of sorts; a light show we witness together with others across the continent.

It’s an apt metaphor for this week’s work of art, “Sunburn of the abundant earth,” by Rachel Eulena Williams. It is showing at the Cooper Cole Gallery in Toronto as part of the exhibition “Hey Mars,” which features Williams, a Black American artist, and Scott Treleaven, a Toronto artist. While “Hey Mars” evokes the idea of looking up to the stars, familiarly, the individual work suggests that our Earth is in a tender state.

Much of Williams’ work is multimedia, a combination of paintings, or paintings deconstructed with the use of wire and fabric. According to the gallery, Williams “works at the boundaries between painting and sculpture.”

Treleaven’s paintings are bold canvases that “resemble microcosms of richly coloured minerals or galaxies.”

We are all searching for meaning right now. We look to the stars, we look to art, to understand the world around us. We see potential and the possibility of creating something new, together.

You can see this exhibition in person at the Cooper Cole gallery or online at coopercolegallery.com.