The Problem Of The Moon

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Carrie Allison, “The Pull of the Moon,” 2021

video still (courtesy of the Gallery)

Each of the artists in The Problem of the Moon recognize 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 is both not the ocean, and is. Photographer Doug Derksen contends with the moon’s own light in order to replicate the night sky, and in doing so emphasizes the dissimilarity of the camera lens and the human eye. In two video works, Carrie Allison obsesses over the paradoxical gravitational pull between the moon and the Earth as it relates to the mother and child, the building and the breath. Paul Robles, likewise, speculates on the bond between those two bodies and our own which are affective, mostly water, and mortal. AJ Little and Oriah Scott collaborate on a hallucinated portal where the mass of the moon is, hurling a corporeal and stigmatized rabbit to our terrestrial level. Bettina Forget’s series draws attention to the troubled taxonomy of the Moon and the scientific systems in which we put so much faith, highlighting a gender binary in order to reveal a deep inequity. In two works, Mike Patten points to the absurdity of settler ownership and reveals an expansive vision made possible by an uncolonial view of the cosmos.