22 October 2023 — I’m thinking about light-at-night, as I set out on at dusk on a neighbourhood walk. It’s the after-effect of a visit to David Wilson’s show, The Ground Beneath My Feet, at the Visual Space Gallery. My friends & I fell into his evocations of dark, rainy night-time streets, each a-glow with ambient light.

We all later reported seeing streets a bit differently because of that show and, as a result, seeing more.

And so, as dusk deepens into night, I find myself noticing light. Ambient light, the play of light, the different impact of objects by-day and by-night.

On Quebec Street, I rediscover with delight the fence running between 19th and 20th, hung with artist Corina Hanson‘s gifts to pedestrians: wooden figures, quotes, old CD tapes, silverware … happy mash-ups of materials and inspiration. For the first time, I walk the fence by night.

I see the metallic gleam of the spoon-fork-knife headdress on a wooden figure, picked out by the street lights…

which also spread a soft glow across this row of “townhouses.”

With nightfall, a very ordinary pathway glass-block light set in grubby concrete is transformed into a commanding beacon…

and over at Main & 18th, the angles of the bent-straw sculpture in Sun Hop Park — a bit faded by day — shine and dance in their bath of street-corner lighting.

(The park, tiny as it is, deserves our attention. For three reasons. First, because it transforms an awkward sliver of real estate into something enjoyable; second, because the sculpture pays tribute to the corner’s former life as site of the Palm Dairy Milk Bar, 1952-89; and third, because the park’s name pays tribute to a nearby grocer who was a neighbourhood fixture in the 1920s.)

I think that’s it, for light-at-night, it doesn’t get better than that.

But then I meet this car, parked just a bit farther north on Main.

Which is a whole tap-dance of reflected lights from the busy strip of bars, cafés, bakeries and assorted eateries — including the neon blast for El Camino’s (Latin American Fast Food) — just behind me.

All this ambient light, in the urban night. We pay a price — we no longer see stars in the sky, just one aspect of that price.

But the light offers some gifts as well.