At the Charles H. Scott Gallery until July 14

Let’s start with a confession and a possible disclaimer. The ideas behind Scott Massey’s new exhibition at the Charles H. Scott Gallery seem intimidating—even before you see the work. The show’s paradoxically cozy subtitle, Let’s Reach c Together—“c” denoting the speed of light—and the accompanying media release, which is also the curatorial essay, promised an exploration of concepts far beyond our ken. Among the inspirations for Massey’s sculpture, photographs, and videos are quantum theory, “Planck’s constant”, and the science and history of both astronomy and photography. Eek.

When you actually walk through the show, however, it becomes clear that you needn’t have scored an A in high-school physics to access what you see. Massey has created enough visual (and aural) intrigue to draw us into his intellectual realm, and curator Cate Rimmer’s essay provides great background illumination. Two durational videos from Massey’s ongoing “Heat=Light=Heat” series record what happens when you apply certain substances (egg, honey) to a large, old-fashioned tungsten light bulb. They convert Max Planck’s discovery of “quanta” into curiously appealing works of art. Transit (viewed through unexposed processed transparency film) is a colour photograph that refers to the transit of Venus and the mapping of the solar system. And Cloud Making (viewed under the principle of least time, or constructive interference), a tabletop sculpture constructed out of antique scientific equipment, invites us to consider the nature of perception and the historical significance of the ground-glass lens.

But this is an art exhibition, and science does not hoof it alone here. Massey makes some significant references to groundbreaking photographs of the 19th and 20th centuries. La Lune Perdue, for instance, alludes to a famously lost daguerreotype by the inventor of that pioneering photographic process, Louis Daguerre. Created in the late 1830s, Daguerre’s image of the moon was the world’s first astronomical photograph, Rimmer writes, but was destroyed in a fire. Using both historical and contemporary technologies, Massey re-creates the ghostly daguerreotype—a pale, pockmarked half-moon floating in space—whose mirrored surface reads as being both dark and bright. It reflects your peering face back at you in a way that brings the individual into the cosmic—and the cosmological. By superimposing the face of the moon and the face of the viewer, Massey offers a glimpse of the way science and art have, through the ages, continued to alter our conception of our place in the world, the solar system, and the universe.

Empty Moon (for Yves Klein) refers to two iconic 20th-century photographs: Harold Edgerton’s Milk Drop Coronet, shot in 1936 using stroboscopic technology, and Yves Klein’s Leap Into the Void, made in 1960 using darkroom photomontage. Where Edgerton’s microsecond image of the crown-shaped splash of a drop of milk demonstrates his adaptation of the photographic medium to the speed of light, Klein’s work, which depicts the artist leaping off a roof into thin air, is a comment on the Cold War space race, and anticipates the Russian launch of the first man into space. Massey’s installation conflates the two images (and the science behind them). It consists of milk in a ceiling-mounted vessel slowly dripping into a wide, shallow aluminum bowl, painted International Klein Blue (a shade associated with his avant-garde art-making) and placed on the floor.

You’re reminded of the wedding of photography to an enhanced understanding of the physical properties of light, leading to the medium’s seeming capacity to arrest motion. Massey’s work also evokes—in a modest and milky way—humankind’s drive to push the limits of our knowledge and propel ourselves into the unknown.