This Monday’s virtual gallery tour takes us to Galerie Donald Browne and transports us to the fourth dimension. An otherworldly black pyramid dominates the room, a tesseract (a geometric shape representing the fourth dimension) guards the entrance, the walls are lined with circular black light boxes which sparkle with the glow of distant stars. Gabriel Coutu-Dumont‘s exhibition Living in Different Worlds captures the aesthetic of A Space Odyssey, but the artist actually draws his inspiration from a different source: sound.

Coutu-Dumont works in the music industry, and much of the materials the artist uses for his art pieces are borrowed from the roadie’s repertoire: road cases and light tracks are subtly modified, and there’s a small video screen tucked into the gallery’s electric panel playing a clip of a team of roadies setting up a stage for a major show.

Click on the frame to launch the virtual tour

What I find fascinating about Coutu-Dumont’s artworks is how he makes sound visible using light – he just shifts the wavelength a little and sound waves become light waves. Mirrors are cut into frequency waves and jut out of the gallery walls at wild angles; the top of the black pyramid is mirrored like an Egyptian obelisk greeting the Sun. The stars of the circular light boxes are man-made: the diffuse light of neons, the blue beams of spotlights, the sparkles of tiny pin-lights. But despite the array of reflected and diffused light, the gallery is absolutely silent, letting us imagine the pulsing sounds of a different world.

Galerie Donald Browne, space 524

Gabriel Coutu-Dumont

Living in Different Worlds

June 11 – July 23, 2011

www.galeriedonaldbrowne.com