At a small art gallery in Oakville, Ont., a meteor is about to strike

On the shore of lapping Lake Ontario, inside an old Tudor home turned into an art gallery, a meteor is about to slam into the Earth. The strange, black rock hovers in the air a few centimetres above a mound of volcanic sand deposited on the gallery floor. 

Frozen at the moment just before impact, the alien object makes for a menacing and magical image. Although thousands of meteorites fall to Earth each year, the scene of this imminent crash causes the mind to wander toward the grand and existential, like the asteroid that snuffed out the dinosaurs or the space rocks that may have ferried the ingredients for life to our planet. It makes you think of beginnings and endings. 

The meteorite is a main character throughout Charles Stankievech's exhibition, The Desert Turned to Glass, on display across Oakville Galleries' two venues. Stankievech is a Toronto-based artist internationally recognized for his experimental and research-intensive fieldwork. In this exhibition, originating at Contemporary Calgary last year, the artist uses installation, sculpture, video and photography that looks out to the cosmos and inward to the shifting mantle of the Earth to trace the evolution of our planet unto the dawn of humankind. The story the show tells is one of creation and destruction, each giving way to the other in a perpetual carousel of transformation.

"The world goes through cycles," Stankievech says in a video interview, "whether it's the Big Bang, the Big Crunch … the great extinction of the meteorite or now as we go through a sixth great extinction. There is a destruction and creation that's constantly occurring. They are two sides of the same story."

Curator and Oakville Galleries director Séamus Kealy describes the exhibition as an exploration of the vast, mysterious universe and our relationship to it. "This is the kind of thing we wake up in the middle of the night contemplating," he says. "It might drive some people to spiritual practice; it drives others toward scientific knowledge, you know, looking for answers to the meaning of life. Here, Charles is encapsulating all that in a really beautiful body of work."

At Centennial Square, Stankievech presents the psychedelic video essay Eye of Silence. Shot across the Albertan badlands, the Utah salt flats, Icelandic and Japanese volcanoes and the Namib desert, the work uses atmospheric drone footage, surveying moon-like craters and smokey fissures for evidence of Earth's making and remaking. The widescreen display is symmetrically mirrored, producing a Rorschach effect at the centre of the frame where the rocky terrain gets kneaded and stretched like dough. 

"It gives a sense of emergence," the artist says. "Some image is constantly being formed right before your eyes … like the earth is coming together and forming new landscapes." It is meant to be a bodily and meditative viewing experience, he explains. The viewer is sucked in by the images extruded from the vortex at the centre of the screen.

Unlike most video work, the soundtrack — which Stankievech has performed live in concert as The Glass Key — actually came first. A former student of the late Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (who popularized the term "soundscape"), Stankievech built the score for Eye of Silence using sounds he recorded from around the globe. It begins, for example, with the whistling and crackling noise of the sun interacting with the Earth's ionosphere during a solar storm captured in the Canadian Arctic. Then, it drops into the Atlantic where dolphins can be heard speaking in an underwater recording made off Cape Canaveral. The artists wanted the composition to explore "the full spectrum of Earth," from outer space to "the deepest places in the world."  

At the Gairloch Gardens location, where the meteor hangs a split-second from touch down, photographs from the video are shown on the walls. Resting on display stands, visitors will find meteorites made of coloured glass. These are "inversions" of the glassy pebbles formed from the high-velocity, high-heat strikes of meteoroids in desert sand, Stankievech explains. The sculptures also reference nuclear explosions (and have been made using sand from the Trinity blast site in New Mexico), which is another instance — also visible in the geologic record — of when the desert turns to glass.

And then there is the large meteorite floating ominously in the central gallery space. Although it appears to hover magically, the rock is held aloft with electromagnets. It is a replica of a 145-kilogram iron meteorite known as Manitou Asinîy (Creator's Stone) or the Iron Creek Meteorite. The rock, which had fallen near present-day Hardisty, Alta., 100 kilometres from the Saskatchewan border, has long held spiritual significance to many Indigenous nations. In 1866, however, it was stolen by a Methodist missionary and later entered into the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto as an important scientific specimen. Today, the Royal Alberta Museum, which has kept the stone for the past 50 years, is working with local nations to repatriate Manitou Asinîy. 

Stankievech envisions the rock floating as a means to suspend "the Western legal framework of ownership" (in most cases, a meteorite is considered the property of the landowner). "The idea was to create a sculpture that really looked at how something like this meteorite can be a shared story between two different cosmologies," he says. How can humans share something that is both sacred and of scientific interest?

When Stankievech began this body of work several years ago, "people were obsessed with endings and the apocalypse," he says. Instead, he wanted to examine origins. 

"Humans are just a small moment within the cosmological. In the sense of deep time, we're pretty new to the game. And so I think there is this idea of understanding our place within that awe."

"Endings," he adds, "aren't exactly what you think they are."