STILL
with a starry night WORDS by MADELEINE RANDMAA ART by GRAEME FISHMAN
The ceiling is towering; the floors concrete. The air is light and cool, and the sounds in the gallery are soft and silvery. It feels hazy like early morning, though it’s almost noon. I notice the dreariness outside, as the clouds refuse to give way to my favourite star. My heliotropic humanness wishes for the clouds to part, to allow a ray to shine through the glass windows. There are one or two other people observing the art, but even more black suits with brass badges observing the people. But there’s a presence in the room, seemingly stronger than the other humans—the presence of Vija Clemins’ drawings. They hang on the white walls, her work an extension of her being. The distilling qualities that I experience in the gallery feel so resonant to the images on the wall as if they were consciously
echoing one another. Celmins once said in an interview that she wants her art to fit her, as though her being could be carried within the edges of the frame. She began her career by drawing every single object in her house, everything she ate, but she didn’t build it up to something it was not. Rather she detailed the everyday and reflected her attentiveness and care for her surroundings into her work. As she became enthralled by astronomy photographs, time and space slowed down under her pencil, paintbrush or charcoal. Night skies were her new subjects. She managed to squeeze the seemingly infinite onto canvases, big and small. This distillation is what entices me; it makes me consider time in different ways. I imagine the time it takes to draw out a
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constellation, the time the universe took to be like this, and the time it takes me to look and feel in awe. Melancholic, microcosmic, meditative, infinite, straightforward, yet utterly complex. Paradoxical in a way. Untitled #1 is in a smaller room off the main gallery, surrounded by other re-creations of the sky and drawings of sandy dunes and pebbly beaches. It is smaller than most of her other works, in a thin milky white frame. It’s difficult to take in the drawing from up close. The stars blur, but as I step back, they somehow morph into a pattern of meticulously placed specks. I see my face reflected in the glass, white speckles of stars run along my cheeks and nose. This place in the universe that Celmins has chosen is unique, the photograph she chose to bring to life will probably never
