Visions and Views at the Ottawa Art Gallery

A wider view: here and before

Maureen Korp

Visions and Views: Landscape and Abstraction, curated by Meghan Ho, is the current exhibition of work selected from the Firestone collection of the Ottawa Art Gallery. Yes. The Group of Seven; that bunch is here along with a score of others. All are artists who have looked long at trees, waters, snowbanks, taking in colours, lines, energies as they developed their artistic voices.

Within the landscape half of Vision and Views is a new voice in the form of an 8-minute multi-media installation by Rachel Kalpana James: Bright Oriental Star (2011). It is comfortably viewed in an alcove of Visions and Views. Sit down on the cushioned bench. Stay there awhile.

There is no start nor finish to Bright Oriental Star. It plays on a continuous loop. The heartbeat sounds of its drum counterpoint a virtual walk back and forth along forested trails of memory into softly shadowed branches. Darkened underbrush meshes into moonlit-dappled lines of thought. From time to time, a few words appear on the screen. Some of the words are quotations from Gitanjali: Song Offerings by Rabindranath Tagore. Others are clips from press coverage of a visit Tagore made to Canada in 1929 when people turned out in multitudes to see him.

Rabindranath Tagore was well-known for a number of reasons. In 1913 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1915 he was knighted by King George V. Then in 1919 Tagore boldly renounced his knighthood. Why? The Amritsar massacre. Reason enough.

Gitanjali: Song Offerings is Rabindranath Tagore’s best-known work in English. It was first published in 1912. Tagore wrote its English text and William Butler Yeats wrote the introduction. Gitanjali is a small but powerful book. The paperback edition this writer has owned since her schooldays is all of 60 pages. From the Gitanjali, we read on the screen of Bright Oriental Star: “Thou has made me endless…such is thy pleasure.”

Step away from the alcove to more of Visions and Views. Nearby paintings appear to reference the colours, lines, and meshed forms of Bright Oriental Star. Trees bending across knolls in Short Rainbow (1936), a small oil painting by David B. Milne, are of this cut as are the blues rising out of waters in Georgian Box Rhythm (1961) by Doris McCarthy. The energies of swirling forms above and beyond the still waters of North Shore of the St. Lawrence (c.1947) by George Pepper are not unlike several frames of Bright Oriental Star.

Of four small paintings grouped closest to the Bright Oriental Star alcove, two particularly seem drawn from similar wellsprings of memory: Clouds on the Prairies (1923) by L.L. Fitzgerald and Lake Simcoe (1920) by J.E.H. MacDonald. In theirs as in Tagore’s work, both literary and visual, we have an affirmation of teachings learned from nature present and past. Moreover, these teachings are framed in the very architecture of the Ottawa Art Gallery today.

On the right side of the alcove presenting Bright Oriental Star is a large window looking out over the café below and onto Daly Avenue. The glass is covered with a grid for safety. Through its grid, however, we can see the mural covering all four storeys of the wall of the parking garage across the street. The mural is entitled Chaos Bloom—Tidal Wave (2024). It is the work of the Ottawa artist EEPMON. How did it come to be there? OAG and MASSIVart made it happen.

Chaos Bloom—Tidal Wave is work meant to be seen from inside and outside the gallery building. Long before there were parking garages, galleries, and city streets, people knew other energies, other life forms in daily life. All are still there somewhere. EEPMON’s Chaos Bloom—Tidal Wave acknowledges this. It opens our eyes wider just as Rachel Kalpana James’ work with Bright Oriental Star does for the Firestone collection. Thank you for these insights.

Bright Oriental Star continues until June 8; Visions and Views continues until January 11, 2026  at 10 Daly St.