The following day was the Hubble’s 20th Anniversary, and Ray gave a talk at the Space Centre in Vancouver. Afterwards, I spoke with him again. We agreed to stay in touch, and I look forward to more conversations about the Hubble, astronomy, and art.

Stacy Sakai with Ray Villard, News Director for the Space Telescope Science Institute

Friday, February 12th, 2010 (6pm to 11 pm) – Rachel Zottenberg of grace-gallery in collaboration with ArtWalk Vancouver 2010 presents ArtWalk Opening Night Party at 2 – 32 Water Street, Vancouver, headquarters of the grace-gallery satellite spaces featuring 23 of Vancouver’s top artists:

Raif Adelberg, Lisa Birke, Ronan Boyle, Bienvenido Cruz, Andy Dixon, The Dark, Christopher Donnelly, Christopher Fadden, Kris Krug, Malcolm Levy, Jeremy Riley, Pamela Masik, Jennifer Mawby, Christian Nicolay, Jeff Petry, Black Peter, Office Supplies Inc., Stacy Sakai, Jesse Savath, Philippe Sokazo, Johnny Taylor, Andrew Tong and Weakhand.

DJs for the opening night are: Michael Venus, Dickey Doo, and Cherchez! The opening night is sponsored by Bear Flag Wine, and City of Vancouver through the Great Beginnings Project and CAN.

ArtWalk Weekend Tour on February 13 and 14, 2010

Following the opening, on the weekend of February 13 and 14, 2010, artists and galleries in the Downtown Eastside, Gastown and Chinatown are opening their spaces to the public for viewing, sales, demonstrations and education. Visitors are invited to explore the galleries, retail spaces, studios and temporary “pop up” grace-gallery satellite spaces, and to see the work of over 250 artists from a full spectrum of disciplines. The ArtWalk weekend provides an opportunity for great public exposure for both locals and tourists during the much-anticipated 2010 Winter Games. Maps, signs and other media are available at www.artwalkvancouver.ca.

About Rachel Zottenberg, grace-gallery and the ArtWalk

In a few short weeks, the energetic Rachel Zottenberg, Director of grace-gallery, boldly secured empty, raw spaces from developers for grace-gallery satellite spaces, and transformed them for ArtWalk Vancouver 2010. Rachel is known to assist artists in the development and presentation of new visual, performing, literary and media art. She encourages artists to take risks, cross boundaries, ask questions, and develop the culture of Vancouver’s art community.

Rachel is also the Curator of ArtWalk Vancouver 2010. The ArtWalk Vancouver Society was founded to provide a platform to promote and aid visual artists in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Chinatown and Gastown community. It’s mission is to present an annual event of the highest standard for the enrichment of cultural life in Vancouver. The ArtWalk serves as a catalyst to arouse wider public interest in the arts, and to encourage artistic dialogue and cultural exchange.

Join the first annual ArtWalk Vancouver 2010, and support the hard work and passion of local artists and artisans who love creating and making art for the sake of art. For more information about this inaugural opening and tour, contact Rachel Zottenberg at:

rachelisgrace@gmail.com
www.grace-gallery.com

Eclectica Magazine covers long and short fiction, poetry, travel, and more. It also features art and photography in every issue. Please see Eclectica Magazine for more information, and the store locations where it is available. Single issues and subscriptions are also available to order online.

In early 2010, Eclectica Magazine will have one of the Spaced Out paintings on it’s cover, and my recent work featured inside. Please be sure to check it out!

“AD INFINITUM: Way higher than any aircraft, Stacy Sakai’s Spaced Out paintings at the Main-and-Third Grace Gallery draw on Hubble telescope observations to picture galaxies and nebula millions of light years away. Sakai was aided by Coquitlam-based Dynamic Structures Ltd. scientist Craig Breckenridge, whose team designed and is building an optical telescope for Hawaii’s Mt. Mauna Kea. A 30-metre mirror will make it the world’s largest.”

Read the full article here: September 19, 2009 Westcoast News section.

Additional Listings:

The Vancouver Sun Gallery Listings.

The Scout List on Scout Magazine.

grace-gallery

Featuring huge scale paintings of the various nebulae and galaxies in our universe. The work is both abstract and yet specific. Sakai paints from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Sakai’s work demonstrates the majesty of our skies, and reminds us how impressive it is that a telescope can be pointed at an area in the sky that is infinitely dark to our eyes, but that is revealed to be replete with stars and galaxies. The farther we look out into the universe, the farther back we are looking in time. This brings back those feelings of awe and curiosity that we often lose as an adult.

Please join us:
This Thursday September 17th
Opening Reception 7pm – 11pm

Musical selection by Dani Vachon hypem.com/danivachon
Event photography by Lindsaysdiet.com www.lindsaysdiet.com
Catering by Narrow Artists Lounge www.narrowlounge.com
Wine selection by Barefoot Wine & Bubbly www.barefootwine.com

grace-gallery is proud to present Spaced Out in honor of the International Year of Astronomy 2009

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009) is a global celebration of astronomy and its contributions to society and culture and marks the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei.  The aim of the Year is to stimulate worldwide interest, especially among young people, in astronomy and science under the central theme “The Universe, Yours to Discover”.

IYA2009 events and activities will promote a greater appreciation of the inspirational aspects of astronomy that embody an invaluable shared resource for all nations. Go to www.astronomy2009.org for more information on this and other IYA2009 events.

grace-gallery and Stacy Sakai would like to thank Matthew Walker Timmons, Craig Breckenridge, Vanessa Leigh and Laurie Gould for their help and support.

grace-gallery
An interdisciplinary exhibition & performance space. grace-gallery offers a lab like setting assisting artists in the development and presentation of new visual, performing, literary and media art. Artists are encouraged to take risks, cross boundaries, ask questions and develop the culture of Vancouver’s art community. grace-gallery aims to facilitate the education, understanding and appreciation of contemporary art by hosting exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances and screenings as well as by publishing and disseminating materials relevant toward this aim. grace-gallery will strive to present an exciting schedule of contemporary art while also allowing space for community based events.
www.grace-gallery.com

Read the ArtConverge article at www.artistrun.org.

Saturday, December 20th, 2008

Omega Swan Nebula

Nebula Paintings, a Convergence of Science and Art

Science has inspired artists for centuries, since Leonardo Da Vinci was accepted as the Renaissance man, or ‘Polymath: The Learned One’, knowledgeable in many fields. These days artists of all sorts, especially conceptual artists, consider it ‘de rigeur’ to apply “Concepts through Visual and Material Culture”.

Stacy Sakai, a Vancouver painter, has based her 2008 series of contemporary paintings on beautifully poetic and abstract imagery of ‘nebulae’, or cloud dust! Her paintings are rich with deep colours and no apparent form. These are not conceived as modernist abstract expressionism; Sakai was interested in documenting the scientific discovery of nebulae from space ‘photographs’.

Unlike the fairy dust that artistic people of all sorts dream about capturing around us, especially as children – Sakai’s cloud-fairy-dust paintings are reproduced from digitally-imaged, light-recording devices of the Hubble Space Telescope! In speaking with the artist, Sakai stated:

After learning about oil painting from my father while growing up in South America, and later from my grandmother, I have since been involved in the art industry in North America for many years. Since 2000, I have exhibited my paintings in Vancouver, Canada, and assisted with art shows and live performance in New York City. All across the Americas we can view the sky, and the Hubble Space Telescope is a good metaphor for linking the fragile dreams of citizens-of-all-colours, in both northern and southern hemispheres.

According to the Hubble website, nebulae are digitally recorded using:

Special electronic detectors, which produce images in shades of black and white. The colour images are combinations of two or more black and white images to which colour has subsequently been added during the image processing.

Yet, her colours are not necessarily a true representation of the actual nebula. She is not illustrating specifically for a scientific audience-reader. As a painter, Sakai has taken the liberty of experimenting with the scientific imagery and colours as ‘viewing tools’ to enhance the data that she is processing and presenting to a very different art market viewer. Sakai takes this scientific data — of an electromagnetic, light-emanating spectrum and delivers it in a colourful, visual form for aesthetic consumption and enjoyable processing for her art viewers.

Did you know that the Hubble Space Telescope, which Sakai is interested in, circumnavigates the earth every 97 minutes, at a speed of 8 kilometers per second, as stated by the Hubble website?! The exact latitude and longitude of the Hubble Space Telescope, at any time, is documented on a ‘fun-facts’ web page for children!

Sakai uses her scientific study to create poetic paintings about timeless celestial beings. In doing so, she is expressing almost intangible, ancient emotions and an artistic preoccupation with sky/seascapes, common landscape subject matter throughout art history and, especially, since Romanticism language.

In contemporary times, Yoko Ono (b. 1933) made this point particularly relevant in the 1970s in her pioneer conceptual performance and installation art about ‘the cosmos’ which often, indirectly, references Ono’s childhood experience of watching the sky during the fire bombing of Tokyo, March 9, 1945.

Like Ono, Sakai’s early interest in astronomy developed in childhood. The sky is a universal phenomenon, available for viewing from all places of the globe; ‘the sky’ does not discriminate between country, ethnicity, and/or political viewpoint of the viewer for the location, context and time-space constraints through using the metaphor of nebulae. Thus, the Hubble Space Telescope images help her to produce strongly compelling emotions in a painterly technique, and yet remain objective in order to alter the artworks according to techniques.

By painting nebulae, Sakai focuses on being a type of colourist, yet scientific at the same time – and (with more involvement in her conceptual and academic approach), perhaps Sakai will become one of a new breed of emerging practice-led ‘artists-as-researchers’.

Cygnus Loop Supernova Remnant

In 2009, Stacy Sakai is working on her next series entitled “Spacescapes.”

ENDNOTES:

(Date and page accessed may be supplied upon request.)

Artist Yoko Ono: ‘Between the Sky and my Head’ 2009 www.balticmill.com/yokoono/
www.hubblesite.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

Dr. Lycia Trouton is the Co-founder of ArtistRun and ArtConverge. She is also a writer, public artist and presenter. Read more about Lycia at www.artistrun.org