Drawing With Starlight

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James Nizam,“Drawing with Starlight (Gate)," 2019

lightjet print mounted on Dibond, 60” x 48” (courtesy of the artist and Gallery Jones, Vancouver)

Vancouver artist James Nizam's photographs resemble schematic designs, and in a way they are. He draws with starlight, as he puts it, tracking celestial bodies through long exposures on his camera. His work, both poetic and technically challenging, has a cosmic scope at the intersection of art and science.

“My subject matter is never there,” says Nizam, whose solo show, Apparent Motions, is at Vancouver’s Gallery Jones until May 11. “I'm always thinking about astronomical measures of time and trying to map out invisible things. So there’s a lot of observation and studying and sort of a theory, or not a theory but a schematic, before I can actually get to what I’m shooting.”

Still, it’s easy to find terrestrial references in his Drawing With Starlight series, on view along with drawings, sculptures and sound media.

Gate, for instance, bursts out like a firework, seemingly exploding myriad outlines shaped like the Empire State Building. Then there’s Ogee, named for a curve that resembles an S. It blossoms like a lotus. Crown feels more like looking up to the oculus of a dome.

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James Nizam, “Drawing with Starlight (Crown)," 2019

lightjet print mounted on Dibond, 60” x 48” (courtesy of the artist and Gallery Jones, Vancouver)

Each month, Nizam heads out to the wilderness, either up the Sunshine Coast, north of Vancouver, or over to Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where there is less ambient light pollution.

He times his visits with the lunar cycle to maximize darkness, hoping the sky will be clear, so he can spend several hours making a single exposure. 

“They are really difficult to nail,” he says.

Nizam began the project when he realized he could not only photograph the trails that stars make during long exposures, but also manipulate those lines by zooming in and out at various intervals. Every star in the frame draws the same pattern, although brighter stars generate bolder lines.

He experimented at first, figuring out how to create different effects – a straight line versus a curved one, for instance – and pondered how various decisions would affect the final image. To create symmetry, he learned to focus on the North Celestial Pole, the point around which stars in the Northern Hemisphere rotate.

Over time, he gained fluency in this new visual language – he refers to the lines as glyphs, a term that refers to the marks used in writing – and his work became more nuanced and complex.

“You can think of it as three actions – you’ve got the zooming in and out, and you've got the rotation of the Earth that essentially creates the star trail," says Nizam, who has exhibited across Canada and in Europe, and was on the Sobey Art Award long list in 2011 and 2017. 

"During the long exposures of the stars, they’re drawing themselves in … I’m interrupting a star trail.” ■

James Nizam: Apparent Motions is on view at Gallery Jones in Vancouver from April 18 to May 11, 2019.