There are a few things that we can know for sure about our prehistoric human ancestors–that they ate, for example, and slept, procreated, and died–by the simple evidence of our own existence in the present. We look at art that they made to prove that they also engaged in imagining. It’s also certain that they gazed at the Moon, because how could they not? It’s so large. It illuminates hours that would otherwise be pitch dark, counts through the seasons, and even has images coded onto its face.
Tracing the inconstant limits of a society’s potential for knowledge (potential that correlates to leadership, enfranchisement, health, and freedom), what has been known and lost about the Moon reflects this constant, universal, individualized obsession with it. A lot of things about the Earth’s moon are interesting, but what is truly remarkable is our enduring, primary relationship with it.
The Moon is a utopic gathering place that can hold all of the knowledge projected onto it at once without conflict. Intuitive, scientific, Indigenous, embodied, and mythological truths can coexist in a way that is not just tolerant of one another, but symbiotic. When we, as children, conclude that the moon is following us over the course of a long car ride, we are understanding a personal relationship, nearness and farness, darkness and lightness. When it comes to the Moon and humans there are no coincidences because the Moon made us who we are. The Moon had dark forms on its face millions of years before rabbits, men, or Marilyn Monroe came to be, and so the Moon doesn’t look like them; they look like the moon. Tidal cycles, harvest cycles, menstrual cycles, were all predetermined long before life began because it was that long ago that the Moon started falling towards Earth.
With the benefit of observations recorded and interpreted by Galileo Galilei (Italian, 1564-1642), Johannes Kepler (German, 1571-1630), and others, a young Isaac Newton (English, 1643-1727) spent the summer of 1666 mulling over the question of what fundamental mathematical laws describe how everything works. To his mind, the fewer the variables and the simpler the equation, the more accurately his God’s design of the universe would be described. Life in Western Europe at this time was engorged with superstition, paranoia, and theocracy, but it was also a boomtime for “natural philosophy.” The Royal Society was founded in 1660, and its motto, Nullius in verba, Latin for “Take nobody's word for it,” was codified two years later. Natural philosophers were therefore adept at reconciling contradictions, such as Gottfried Leibniz, a German polymath and contemporary of Newton. Leibniz famously believed not just in a universal design but in the intention behind that design. There was no ambiguity for him in questions of why things are the way they are, because the answer was always, simply and categorically, God made it, and it is therefore the best possible world.
In this world (as Galileo noted fifty years earlier after looking through the first telescope) the Moon is made of rock. Strange, though, because rocks fall towards Earth. In this era of living contradictions, old justifications of cosmic strati and magical materials were no longer adequate explanations of how the Moon stays up there. It was the search for a divinely simple explanation that tantalized Newton.
American Journalist Robert Krulwich shorthands that puzzle as “the problem of the moon,” in the sense of a mathematical problem: solve for x when x describes floating and falling the same way. The answer, we now know as common knowledge, is that the moon is in orbit, describing a motion that would be forever forward-moving (according to Newton’s own First Law) except for the pull of gravity toward the centre of Earth, which is the same gravity that makes things fall.
That “problem of the moon” is a question that begins with a “how,” but other problems run the gambit of whys and whens and in-what-ways. The Moon is so much like the Earth but dead–without an upper crust that churns and mixes like the Earth’s, she has to bear every scar forever. She’s so big and far away, and we’re so obsessed with her, and, as the artists in this exhibition show, we give her so much to hold. The Problem of the Moon recognizes the immense burden that the moon carries as a metaphor with mass.
○○○Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson is struck by how much larger the moon is in the Saskatchewan sky than in the seascape of her native Japan. For her, the problem of the moon is that it’s mutable and dual, being both opposite and identical to the ocean. In Lunar Sea, the artist has occupied the moon with whales made of golden thread. Some people believe that whale song is a line of communication to a water planet in the Sirius system, just a little more than eight and a half light years from Earth. The embroidery piece is accompanied by a sculpture, Lunar Waves, which freezes terraced ocean waves at the scale of a suiban (a shallow, plate-shaped vase usually used to display auspicious rocks.)
Full Moon and Crescent Moon cast the Moon as a confidante. Rendered in delicate cotton details on thick wool felt, these works are the inverse of a cold and distant Moon. “Look at the night sky,” the artist writes, “You can see…the light of the full moon trying to wrap around your entire body.” The crescent moon is likewise comforting, in this case as a reminder of the utter darkness that it is not. It “glows as a promise…upon which the fullness builds.” The four artworks together are a metaphysical proposition. If the Moon is the solicitous guardian of both the sea and the sky, then the sea and the sky are siblings. These textiles are about delivery and reflection of light, love, and sound, and by what channels they get sent back to Earth.
The delivery of light is essential to Doug Derksen’s photographs, as it foregrounds the incomprehensible differences between the eye and the camera. Derksen’s portfolio is dominated by vast land- and sky-scapes, shot in remote locations at irregular hours, requiring patience and stillness to capture uncontrollable phenomena in his lens. The active verb of “capturing” in reference to taking pictures belies the truth of light itself, and presumes that it can be contained. Both of the images in the exhibition embrace the Moon as a generator of light instead of a reflector and emphasize the fleeting rather than the permanent. In Moon over Clear Lake, the Moon appears as a fiery orb embedded in a thick layer of clouds. The light has the quality of the setting Sun rather than the rising Moon, and the reflection on the lake surface seems to be shooting down rather than bouncing off. Although less acutely illusionistic, Moon over Long Beach rewards a long gaze, mirroring the camera lens’ aperture. The turbulence of the atmosphere is contradicted by the stability of the stars behind, and the Moon, again, is nothing but the light it emanates.
Phrases like “the dark side of the Moon,” or the use of waxing and waning to describe the moon’s phases are reminders of the collectively-failed test of object permanence that betrays humanity’s deep narcissism. The Moon, of course, continues to be a sphere day-to-day, regardless of how much it is illuminated or perceived. Although we know reflectively that the Moon is a permanent object in our sphere of awareness, our intuitive sense is less logical, and so we manufacture false permanence through acts of ownership.
One of these acts is naming, which, as Lucy Lippard puts it, ”is, with mapping and photography, the way we image (and imagine) communal history and identity.” Bettina Forget’s Women with Impact series critiques the standard naming practices for the Moon’s cartographic features. She highlights a gender binary in order to reveal the deep inequity that of the 1,578 craters that have been catalogued on the Moon’s surface, only 32 are named after women, or 2%. The drawings in her Women with Impact project are portraits of 30 of these craters, created in much the same way as one would draw a portrait of a person. Forget is an amateur astronomer, and she used the same procedure as Galileo when he made the first detailed drawings of the moon, which is to say sitting at her manual telescope in the dark, shifting her glance from the enlarged moon to her dimly lit sketch pad, repositioning occasionally as the Earth spins on its axis and the moon moves along its orbit.
A somewhat more heavy-handed performance of ownership is the planting of flags. When the first humans landed on the moon in 1969, the astronauts that disembarked carried what they needed to survive and complete their work, as well as a United States flag, which they planted in the ground, and left. Without any atmosphere to protect it, this first flag and the five that followed in subsequent landing missions were bleached white by the Sun. But no matter. The flags were “purely symbolic” in the first place, as there is a United Nations-mandated preclusion of any national claim to extra-terrestrial territory. Mike Patten’s sculpture The Colonization of the Moon is a visual pun that points to the multiple levels of absurdity in the practice: first, that the act of planting a flag could be anything other than symbolic; second, the uselessness of property ownership; and third, the “frenetic competition of countries that want to assert their belonging” to a place that transcends boundaries. There is abounding, dark humour in this constant, imperial impulse to possess by leaving a scrap of identity behind.
In his other work Speed of Night, Patten animates the approach and disintegration of four major constellations in order to propose Indigenous cosmology as a mode of connection between the human body and the celestial. He writes, “Stars are considered celestial guides, helping navigate both physical and spiritual realms. Understanding our place in space reinforces the notion that we are part of something … interconnected [that] … can foster a sense of unity and respect for all life on Earth and beyond.” The soundtrack of the animation is provided by Anishinaabe artist and musician Craig Commanda, and the artist statement as well as the names of the constellations are spoken in Kanyen’kéha by translator Wilhelmina Beauvais. Sound, image, and language unite in this collaborative work, asserting names rather than assigning them, prophylactic, says the artist, to the absolute loneliness of empty space. “As space continues to expand, there is a possibility that future generations could face a sense of isolation beyond reach. This notion highlights the importance of maintaining our connection to the cosmos and preserving our human heritage.”
Connecting to the cosmos is a notion that AJ Little became acutely aware of during a hallucinogenic experience near James Bay when they saw the circle of the Moon invert. It transformed from a presence into an absence–from a disc to a portal or a pin-hole, implying an invitation in. The rabbit, which people from many cultures see inscribed on the face of the moon, also morphed at that time into a reflection and self-portrait of the artist. “Getting Up” 12 km South of James Bay looks to the rabbit to create links between multiple selves and death, inclusive of libido, birth, salvation, doom, creation, and reincarnation. As a reflection in a portal, the artist-incarnated-as-rabbit is terrestrial and corporeal on one hand, and omnipresent and immortal on the other.
The moon in the piece is one of a series of orbs by Oriah Scott. Like Little, Scott’s art practice is grounded in graffiti, and the circular canvas references that practice in style as well as content, particularly the concept of the written name as a likeness. The title, “Getting Up,” is taken from the culture, meaning to get a name or a tag on a wall, especially a wall so high that it will never be covered. It invites us to imagine a tag on the moon, which might be secure forever. Little is quick to point out that the miscreancy of tagging, which is asserting one’s self portrait onto public space, mostly happens at night, under the cover of darkness. The installation is an amalgam of whimsy and grief in which the rabbit protagonist is perpetual and stigmatized. As a collaborative work, it is a self-portrait of a friendship based on hooliganism and grounded in profound reality. Against the cartoony cheer of the Moon’s face, the gruesome sculpture embedded in earth–perhaps long since dead, perhaps lingering in agony–is the frightening confession of an artist whose life has nearly ended so often that Leibniz’s theory of the Best Possible World may well be the only explanation.
Paul Robles makes traditional craft practices contemporary in order to speculate on the bond between celestial bodies and our own, which are affective, mostly water, and mortal. The works in this exhibition are new visitations to his Black Moon series. The series began in 2011 following the death of the artist’s father, which occurred under a full moon while at sea. Occupied with animal “familiars,” such as birds, snakes, and monkeys, the series captures “an unsettling suspension of time and place…an uneasy feeling of operating outside of consciousness,” and a lamentation of lost time. Robles selects animal forms from the Chinese zodiac, which corresponds to lunar years. The royal blue paper and translucent film used for The Moon Talks to me when I Sleep recalls the unsteady crepuscular hours that hinge the night and the day, the ghost world and the real world. Waning Gibbous concretizes memories of the artist’s cat Milo, who passed during the first full moon following the autumn equinox in 2022.
Robles has created other paper work on the topic of death that he refers to as “dream vomits,” “clumps,” or “murmurations.” The loose edges and chaotic expansion that those terms imply suits Robles’ medium, where cutting paper (especially the defiant cutting of origami paper, which is not supposed to be cut) ought to expand it, ought to release its entropic tendencies. For those things that should be contained, Robles chooses the Moon to contain them. With no escape from within the circular boundary, the inhabitants of the work are subject to the disruptions of cutting, shaping, and overlapping, assembled into compositions that approach but reject symmetry. Like a planet, these two moons are held together by an inward force made stronger by virtue of their density.
In two video works, Carrie Allison links the herculean bond between the Earth and the Moon to the pull between mother and child. Framed in this way, motherhood is more than a new relationship–it is a new state of being. Her videos marry the practice of beading with stop-motion animation to take advantage of the most prominent feature of both: their slowness. She created The Pull of the Moon in 2021 while waiting for her first child to come “Earth-side” in order to reflect on the palpable, irresistible force that bound her to him. The divided screen shows fading daylight and the beginning of night–transitional moments that are only transitional, seemingly impossible to capture. The moon grows at the hasty speed of six beads per second, while below the tide continues its motion, up, down, and up, every 12 hours and 25 minutes, as it always has. The artist describes the work in this way: “The Pull of the Moon … combines the old and new technologies. It explores the new emotions of becoming a mother through the time-based and ceremonial practice of beading. The stop-motion beadwork superimposed on the ocean landscape is a reminder of the force that pulls the tides and the rhythms of non-human time.”
Allison made My Moon in the company of her child. Here, the moon grows at the pace of one bead per breath for seven minutes, set against a pure white background. The changing of state from individual to mother and child is distanced from any indicator of time or context. It is at once a record of and a reprieve from a new mother’s anxiety–the unquenchable need for the reassurance of your child’s next breath. By denying the viewer the satisfaction of a complete circle, the ending of the video is an ellipses implying continuance, and Jessie Beier’s droning soundscape fades out in a dying fall, eliciting feelings of uncanny or unresolved dread. Beier, incidentally, has interrogated the existential significance of sound in outer space as a means of territorialization. She writes:
The realization that such sounds [as those that emanate from celestial bodies] exceed and override human capacities, creates a sense of unease; the fragmenting perceptual excesses produced by these cosmic bodies quash commonplace correlations between thought and its object, thus producing an overwhelming sense of dread.
The dreadful impression created by these planetary bodies is significant in the way that it differs from more common feelings of danger ascribed to human explorations of deep space. It is not that we fear these sonic emissions in terms of their content, but rather, what we fear is our inability to recognize ourselves within them.
It was Allison’s intention to create a work that was precisely seven minutes long because of the number’s significance in nehiyaw/cree culture, and because creating parameters builds tension. The temporal and sonic boundary-making at work in My Moon taps into that which is non-human about us: namely, all the creation that came before.
○○○If the problem of the Moon is how much we ask her to hold, maybe it’s the fault of her constancy. If she weren’t so reliable, so familiar, perhaps we wouldn’t trust her with our human treasures. Visitors might notice that many of the artworks included in The Problem of the Moon are dated 2024–surprising, given the early month and considering how long it takes to plan an exhibition. Of the eight artists that I spoke to regarding this project, only three of them were approached because of extant work that I thought would be a good fit. Each of those three were also working on something new. But for all eight visits, I started the conversation with a variation of, “I’m thinking about the Moon. Are you working on anything…moon?” Only one artist was not. From the rest, it was a resounding murmur of ideas and inklings that they were putting together and thinking through.
I share that detail of exhibition design as anecdotal evidence that the Moon is rarely far from our thoughts. I haven’t tried it, but I imagine that I could ask the same thing of anyone I ran into, friend or stranger: “Any thoughts on the Moon?” I suspect that only 1/8th or so would ignore the question. The rest of them would pull a face and cautiously start speaking: “Well, now that you mention it…”
BibliographyRadiolab. “Is there an edge to the Heavens?” Podcast. Aired February 20, 2012. https://radiolab.org/podcast/187718-edge-heavens Science Writers at Clue. The myth of moon phases and menstruation, April 19, 2017. https://helloclue.com/articles/cycle-a-z/myth-moon-phases-menstruation
The Royal Society. “History of the Royal Society.” https://royalsociety.org/about-us/who-we-are/history/
University of Winnipeg, “Unsettling the Spirits Panel Discussion,” YouTube, October 30, 2023, panel discussion, 24:28-28:34. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBeewcAgR6Q&t=1653s
Jessie Beier and Jason Wallin, “Sound Without Organs: Inhuman Refrains and the Speculative Potential of a Cosmos-Without-Us.” in Bernd Herzogenrath, ed. Sonic Thinking : A Media Philosophical Approach. Thinking Media. New York, NY, USA: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.
Dolnick, Edward. The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World. New York: Harper Collins, 2011
Bettina Forget, “Women With Impact: Taking One Small Step into the Universe.” Leonardo 2021; 54 (1): 63–70. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01985
Komada, Y., Sato, M., Ikeda, Y., Kami, A., Masuda, C., & Shibata, S. “The Relationship between the Lunar Phase, Menstrual Cycle Onset and Subjective Sleep Quality among Women of Reproductive Age.” International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(6), 3245. (2021). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18063245
Anne M. Platoff, Where no flag has gone before,” NASA History Portal, August 1993. Accessed March 2024.
https://historycollection.jsc.nasa.gov/
THE ARTISTS
Carrie Allison is a multidisciplinary visual artist of nêhiýaw/cree, Métis, and mixed European descent based in K’jipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She grew up on the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. Her maternal roots and relations are based in maskotewisipiy (High Prairie, Alberta), Treaty 8.
She holds a Master in Fine Art, a Bachelor in Art History, and a Bachelor in Fine Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She was the 2020 recipient of the Melissa Levin Award from the Textile Museum of Canada and was long listed for the 2021 Sobey Art Award. Her work has been shown in Canadian Art, Elle Quebec, Esse, and Visual Arts News.
________________________________________Doug Derksen is a photographer based in Brandon, Treaty Two, Manitoba. As a youth, he spent a lot of time outdoors working on the family fruit farm, as well as engaging in frequent outdoor recreation. He pursued a career in agricultural research as a means to contribute to sustainable crop production, and to satisfy his interest in what lay beyond the fields. Although he has carried a camera around for most of his life, an unsuccessful medical procedure in 2000 compelled him to focus more acutely on photography as a survival mechanism. During the following eight years of bedrest, he leaned into the priorities of spending time with his family and looking deeply at the natural world. A second surgery started a long slow recovery, so today, though still somewhat limited, he is able to venture to remote places where he can witness, open to what is around him and what is within.
________________________________________Bettina Forget is the Director of the SETI Institute’s Artist-in-Residence (AIR) program. In this capacity, she facilitates the collaboration between artists and SETI researchers, foregrounds art-science research practice, and creates opportunities to disseminate the resulting art projects to a wider audience.
She is currently a doctoral candidate in Art Education at Concordia University, Canada. Her research examines the recontextualization of art and science, and how transdisciplinary education may disrupt gender stereotypes. Bettina’s creative work focuses on space sciences, inspired by her avid engagement with amateur astronomy. She has exhibited her artwork in the USA, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Russia, Spain, Singapore, and Nicaragua. Born in Germany, Bettina studied at Central St-Martins School of Art in London, England, at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore.
________________________________________AJ Little is a multi-disciplinary artist residing in Montreal. The chosen mediums of their work vacillate, combining elements of film, textile, sculpture, and drawing. Their work primarily explores memory, depersonalization, and leftist-politics through the imagery of the monstrous, the campy, and the grotesque. The themes come together expressed in a type of personal narrative making sense of the abstract psychic ills of modern life.
Oriah Scott is an award-winning muralist and graffiti writer from Toronto. Currently, his work is exploring the meeting place of form, structure, and meaning. Through the fixation and rendering of planetary orbs, Oriah tries to reconcile the void, not as formless thing, but as an entity–a shape bursting at the seams. Oriah Scott was born on a dirt road.
________________________________________Mike Patten is a contemporary visual artist based in Montreal and a member of the Zagime Anishinabek First Nation in Saskatchewan. He holds a B.F.A. in painting and a B.F.A. in drawing with a minor in art history from the University of Regina and he has participated in solo and group exhibitions internationally and nationally in museums, artist run centers, commercial spaces, and university galleries. In 2017, he was one of the Laureates for the Hnatyshyn Foundation‘s REVEAL- Indigenous Art Awards. And he is presently the Director of the Contemporary Native Art Biennial in Montreal – a nonprofit organization with a mandate to recognize and support contemporary Indigenous art and artists.
________________________________________Born in the Philippines, Paul Robles is a Canadian artist based in Winnipeg. He is recognized for his intricate cut paper works, in which he combines the delicacy associated with traditional hand work that addresses psychological and emotional states ranging from animist familiars, folklore, spirits, trauma, and grief.
He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (Gold Medal) from University of Manitoba School of Art and Bachelor of Arts degree (Sociology) from The University of Winnipeg. Robles has exhibited widely in Canada, USA, and France. He has participated in Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute Residence Program, and Papier Art Fair, Montreal. In May of 2019, he exhibited a new body of work at C2-Centre for Craft in Winnipeg and in summer 2021 his work was a part of an exhibition at the Regina Art Gallery.
________________________________________Hanna Yokozawa Farquharson is a Japanese-Canadian textile artist living in Saltcoats, Saskatchewan. She incorporates traditional Japanese cultural elements and aesthetics in her work, which at the same time reflects the land and environment where she now lives. One year after buying her first sewing machine in 2016, she began entering work into international craft exhibitions. Since then, her work has been featured in many juried exhibitions and publications, including Canadian Quilters Magazine and Studio Magazine Canada. In her work, she is drawn to minimal designs that express the Japanese concept of “Wabi-Sabi,” in which beauty is found in imperfections and in simplicity. She looks for richness in the history and meanings of the objects that surround her, including the people who were a part of it and the depths that they move within.
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