Star Witnesses at the Polygon

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Installation view of Carrie Mae Weems' “The North Star” at The Polygon Gallery (photo by Dennis Ha)

I have a memory of watching our old television set on a dark night in early 1991 – my mother wringing her hands with worry as we watched trails of light stream across a blurry black screen and then explode into a small but bright pop.

For the first time I watched a missile strike for what is now known as the Gulf War, although its violence wasn’t real to me yet. It looked like the dark sky on some chaotic night where the stars were flying. 

It is a kind of slow and fixed attention that we give to scenes such as this: dark, hard to see, tumultuous. They're the sort of scenes that Monica Szewcyck, Audain Chief Curator and curator of the exhibition Star Witnesses at Vancouver’s Polygon Gallery, calls a “divisive constellation of views.” 

Until Sept. 28, Star Witnesses points our vision at the cosmos as a way to contemplate how we might survive life on Earth.

The exhibition gathers 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), and Paul Wong – who, together, cast a constellation of perspectives, locations, migration, and histories. 

Weems’ 2022 series of seven prints of the eponymous The North Star, sets a guiding through-line for visitors. Neither immediately recognizable as photography, nor as Weems’ signature style, which tends towards figurative portraiture, The North Star centres the singular light of history’s travellers, including Frank Weems, the artist’s grandfather who fled his home in Arkansas after a brutal racist attack in 1937, never to be seen again. The star marks her grandfather’s journey, a piercing glow illuminating a haunted and unfinished path towards redemption – a lawsuit against the state of Arkansas prepared by Frank but never filed. 

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Installation view of “Star Witnesses” at The Polygon Gallery, featuring works by Urban Subjects and Bouchra Khalili (photo by Dennis Ha)

Other artworks by Urban Subjects and David Horvitz similarly consider how the stars define pathways. The Subjects’ Bitter, Derksen and Weber created a 2020 postcard that photographs the night sky above Traiskirchen, Vienna’s largest refugee camp, while Horvitz’s 2017 artwork For Kiyoko envisions the stars from the site of Amache, the Japanese internment camp in the U.S. where his his grandmother was imprisoned for three years during the Second World War.

Each work ponders the solace that comes from gazing up, especially when one is unmoored and dispossessed, while sustaining a meditation on the shared nature of this view.

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Installation view of Paul Wong's “9 Full Moon Drawings Neon” at The Polygon Gallery (photo by Akeem Nermo)

That we share the sky with others across history and distance is a wholesome commonality that lines such deeply personal works with a somewhat clichéd thread – but clichés can be true.

Depictions of the cosmos risk the edge of corniness because the stars rightly compose many of our finest human truisms. It’s funny how beauty works. It is, I think, a risk worth taking because the deepness and the vastness of space both contains and disintegrates us, perhaps helping us feel more in the world. This is important. 

I am pulled into the utter blackness of Paul Wong’s diamonds, Parallel Universes. Meanwhile, my vision is dispersed, transported, like thousands of stars across Thomas Ruff’s series of skyscapes – a majority of work in the show.

I feel everywhere all at once, and just the same, my feet are planted on the ground. ■

Star Witnesses is on view at Polygon Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia until Sept. 28, 2025.

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