Artists of the night take over Profiles

With a name like Nocturnal, it doesn’t seem to make sense that the place isn’t open at night.

The Profiles Public Art Gallery show definitely brings on the night and many other dark things. In that sentence, ‘dark’ refers to both the relative lack of light and also the atmosphere and attitude of the art pieces.

Take Madame Tutli-Putli for example. The National Film Board animated short movie from filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski is an oddly nightmarish and psychological journey that one woman takes on a train.

The stop-motion camera technique helped it win an Academy Award two years ago but it’s the additional computer animation that really sends this one over the top. Real eyes have been digitally pasted into the faces, making it look like these humanoid puppet dolls actually have souls. It has to be seen in order to be appreciated. While watching it in a corner of the larger exhibit, keep in mind that the 17-minute piece took five years to make.

Of course this is just one of four corners, the rest occupied by visual artists of different disciplines. Interestingly, the works of one artist has more of a three-dimensional element than even the puppets of Madame Tutli-Putli.

Karolina Kowalski creates abstract sky scenes with charcoal and the addition of dressmaking pins, some with the heads cut off. (I warned you it would be dark.)

The effect is like staring into stars or floating in the sky at night and looking down at the glow of the city lights from miles above the earth.

The recent University of Alberta fine arts graduate explained she has always had a connection with the stars.

“I like to explore different aspects of the cosmos, the universe, the totality of things that exist. I’ve always been drawn to the infinite and the endless nature of space or just the way we view it.”

Kowalski said the idea for the pins came from her original concept: maps.

“It grew from there and then [I looked for] a way that I could push an abstract landscape of space. My hope is that when people look at it with the right lighting that it will transcend that physicality, where they just see the reflection of the light and not so much the fact that there’s a pin on the surface of the paper.”

This is obviously a way for her to combine two of her loves. When she started at university, she wasn’t thinking of charcoal and pins.

“It was in physics. I was nowhere near art,” she laughed. “Just because of that fascination that I had in astronomy and space.”