The night sky has long been the cultural, social, religious, and scientific repository of our earth-bound yearnings. But it’s always such serious stuff: origins myths, cosmologies, cultural beliefs and attitudes, and real science. Where is the joy? The delight? The whimsy? Well, actually it’s right here in Whitby. 
Jennifer Dorner, Lion (from Outer Space Parade Floats with Greenhouses), 2013, oil on canvas
Montreal-based artist Jennifer Dorner has it in her exceptionally talented hands and mind, and has applied it to the paintings in her exhibition AREA CODE: Blueprints for Future Escape, newly opened at Station Gallery. Her take on the night sky is decidedly one of delight, populated not only with the stuff of stars and planets, but also with, of all things, parade floats. Four separate panels comprise Outer Space Parade Floats with Greenhouses, a series from 2013 in which she imagines enormous space vehicles constructed in the shape of animals – a lion, a swan, an eagle, and a goose – that also contain, well, greenhouses. It can’t help but evoke a sci-fi film like Silent Running, a dystopic futurist scenario about such things (enormous spacecraft housing the last of the earth’s flora in greenhouses, I mean), albeit intentionally taken to a preposterous degree. Dorner’s are delightfully absurd things of no reasonable actuality floating in a featureless and empty space, unmoored from the mundane demands of technological reality. It’s pure ridiculous fantasy, but the night sky has always been home to ridiculous fantasies (a constellation shaped like a clock?).
Accompanying the strange spacecraft is her enormous painting Four Hemispheres: four joined panels that depict a map of the earth with all the landmasses outlined by a connect-the-dots pattern of light. She’s envisaged our home planet as if it were one of those constellations, points of starry light in the deep blue of a night sky (and the Antarctic arranged along the bottom is especially luminous, with its myriad points like tiny snowballs). Scattered within the continental shapes are miniature containers for water – from disposable plastic bottles to glass Perrier bottles to the big refillable bottles that sit atop water coolers – that Dorner has situated to denote the major lakes and river systems. Our very own Great Lakes, for example, are symbolized by a trio of rather enormous water bottles. The discrepancy between what is essentially the utile and highly generalized abstraction that is a map and the representational specificity of an odd assortment of things seemingly randomly adrift in space (but which are actually acutely meaningful signifiers) creates an effective aesthetic tension.
In Dorner’s work there’s ample space, in the end, to encompass the serious stuff, both celestial and earthbound, and the twin imperatives of delight and whimsy. It’s the stuff so often overlooked, and often even demeaned, in all the earnestness with which we’ve draped the heavens above. But Dorner gives it voice. And we hear it.
Station Gallery: http://www.whitbystationgallery.com/
Jennifer Dorner: AREA CODE: Blueprints for Future Escape continues until September 7.
Gil McElroy is a poet, artist, independent curator, and freelance art critic. He is the author of Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art, four books of poetry, and Cold Comfort: Growing Up Cold War. McElroy lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather. He is Akimblog's roving Ontario correspondent and can be followed @GilMcElroy on Twitter.
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Jennifer Dorner at Station Gallery in Whitby
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