These past days have seen local events of considerable magnitude (ie. game 7 and ensuing riots) but nothing has been as thrilling as the installation of Brent Comber’s new landscape art -- 'The Sentinels' -- at the Duthie Gallery on Salt Spring Island. It is, in the true sense of the word, awesome.
The 9 'Sentinels' stand 9’ high in a circle 18’ in diameter. Carved maple slabs, shaped and polished and tinted flesh tones for the soft inside and blue-veined on the burly outside, they are conceived as a circle of elders, guards, sentinels, circling protectively and leaning forward, to counsel, to warn, to tell their collective generational stories. Abstractly human, each individual distinct; they exhibit the marks and rings of their long growth and great age.
The colours, hues and shadings of 'The Sentinels' change constantly in the changing daylight. At night, at the Night Gallery, they are illuminated and become a brilliant visual and sensual experience in the dark; they loom more closely (and dramatically) inwards, the darkness looms outside of the circle, the colours glint and the shadows shift; they form a tighter circle, a perfect place to listen to the stories these old figures tell. The precisely ordered arrangement of the figures in the circle creates an audio phenomenon, an echo in the centre as in a dome. ‘The Sentinels’ conjures an exhilarating and profound experience of mystery and power. (Brent Comber: The Sentinels - $125,000)
Summer Lights 2011
at the Duthie Gallery
Opening Gala July 1 at 9 - midnight.
Come and experience Summer Lights in the summer nights:
Lighten up at the Night Gallery
The Night Gallery is open 9 - 11pm. Thursday to Monday
Gallery open daily 10 - 5
July & August
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