Angelica Babiera | Staff Writer
Featured image: The weekly Friday Night Live at the ROM will feature CHIHULY on November 25. | Courtesy of the ROM
Ever felt the pain and discomfort of getting sand in your eyes? The Royal Ontario Museum, or ROM, has an exhibit completely dedicated to this phenomenon—somewhat. Artist Dale Chihuly created different shapes in glass made from sand and used abstract colours to portray a unique perspective on sand, fire, crystals and gardens by using glass blowing in his exhibit CHIHULY.
The 11 large-scale works are a true sight for sore eyes. The whole exhibit was surrounded by black walls and grey flooring to emphasize the installation’s vibrant colours and its use of lighting.
The ROM announced on October 6 that CHIHULY, on display at the Garfield Weston Exhibition Hall, would be extended until January 8. The exhibit swept its visitors away with its innovative designs and nature-inspired works.
The first pieces of work in the gallery are two of CHIHULY’s “Boats” installations. The “Ikebana Boat” is decked out in every hue of purple in snaking tendrils, while the “Float Boat” is filled with orange and yellow cylindrical objects. What made these two pieces of work so effortlessly cool and impressionable was the way the lighting was fixed upon them. The lighter hues of purple for the “Ikebana Boat” reflected light, which created a halo effect on the whole boat and as a result, made it look ethereal.
For “Float Boat,” the lighting and vibrant shades of yellow and orange created a similar look of the planets in our solar system, as if to suggest the infiniteness of the cosmos.
One of the more popular and bigger pieces that many visitors seemed to enjoy looking at was “Laguna Torcello.” This artwork was named after a lagoon island in Venice. It portrayed a dreamy underwater scene with coral reefs and sea-plants. CHIHULY showed a natural setting where the corals reflected sunlight underwater from the use of fixed lighting on the lighter-coloured glasses.
As visitors continued to roam through the exhibit, they were taken to arctic lands with “Lime Green Icicle Tower,” to forests where there are “Red Reeds on Logs,” to a garden with flowers tangled on “Persian Trellis” and finally to a “Northwest Room,” all in one day. It would have been like travelling the world, but in a more affordable setting.
On one of the walls in the exhibit room, a quote from Chihuly reads: “I want people to be overwhelmed with light and colour in a way they never have experienced.” He achieves this effect with his out-of-this-world creations.
Chihuly expresses creativity and the power of colour in all his installations. He used normal objects and settings and turned them into something more, romanticizing the ubiquitous and exercising our imagination. In a building filled with artifacts and history like the ROM, Chihuly’s exhibit truly steers away from the seriousness of it all, focussing purely on the aesthetics of art and beauty. The whole exhibit moves away from negativity and focuses on the beauty and positivity. As Chihuly once said: “I never met a colour I didn’t like,” and this transpires to the whole theme of his exhibit. Don’t fear colours—find them.
CHIHULY takes bringing out the beauty in the mundane to a whole new level.
