Night Light Festival’s satellite displays offer visitors the opportunity to see spaces in Windsor in a whole new light!
From Sept 4th – 22nd the windows at The Gallery at The Capitol will be alight with works by four local artists. In partnership with the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, the Night Light Community Art Display features artworks that come to life when the sun sets on downtown Windsor. The display is designed to be viewed from the sidewalk outside of 109 University Avenue West.

To see inside the display The Gallery at the Capitol will be open from 5pm -8pm on Friday Sept 19th.

From September 18-22nd see works by local artists Jessica Cook and Happy Sleepy (Marc Ngui and Magda Wojtyra) transform the lobby of Windsor’s International Aquatic Training Centre.
Located across the parking lot from the gallery, the Aquatic Centre is one of the city’s most loved sport and leisure spaces.

Learn more about the artists and artworks below:

The Gallery at the Capitol

Alexandria Masse
Stalactite, 2025
100% Canadian wool, LED strip light
Courtesy of the artist

Inspired by the stalactites that hold tight to cave ceilings, this work plays with contrasts.  The softness and warmth of wool is at odds with the cold and isolation of a cave environment. Made with thousands of crocheted stitches, each holding another to create a magnificent structure. Stalactite is about community. Thousands of living organisms working together to create form. 

Alexandria Masse (she/her) is an artist who works with textiles and fibres to construct soft sculptures and wearable art. Masse holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Textiles/Fashion with a Minor in Art History from NSCAD University. She was born and raised in Wawiiatanong (“Windsor, ON, Canada”). Masse is fascinated by how a material can be manipulated and uses sewing, knitting and crochet to make whimsical sculptures. She channels the subconscious through her work by taking in her lived experiences and using that drive to create work that flows dimensionally. Driving new ways to cherish and reclaim her culture within her work. As a woman working with fibre, she constantly finds herself challenging the preconceived notion of textiles, fibre and craft. Masse unpacks what that means internally while utilizing crochet, knitting, and sewing to connect and continue the matriarchal traditions of craft in her family.

Patricia Coates
Wetlands, 2011
20 digital prints on Duratran, steel light boxes Courtesy of the artist

I live and work in Amherstburg, Ontario. This site borders Big Creek Provincially Significant Wetland to the east and Fermi II Nuclear Power Plant, across the Detroit River to the west. The plurality of this place – its techno-agriculture, wetland, and heavy industry is a microcosm of global environmental concerns. Here, I’ve been transforming 60 acres from industrial agriculture into habitat, growing and planting trees of the Carolinian forest and wetland, while remaining acutely aware that my resistance against “Big Ag” may be no more than a futile gesture. This “earthwork” is a world of flux, rejuvenation, and transformation, a work complete unto itself, and a place that inspires much of my performance, film, and installation work, propelled by the question: How is it that we have poised ourselves to destroy the prospects for a decent existence for much of life?

Wetlands was created in 2011 for what was then called the Art Gallery of Windsor Biennial. That summer, I spent long days in July and August traipsing through farm fields towards Big Creek, immersing myself in a kind of marsh residency, looking, listening, and recording the phenomena of what made this place seem otherworldly: iridescent duckweed, swirling, crawfish chimneys perfectly constructed only later to be desecrated by hungry predators. I sat perched in duck blinds for hours, hidden by mauve and olive camouflage enmeshed in spider webs. The wet, black earth oozed at my feet. Walking home, I tracked deer, their hooves imprinted in the baked earth along the farm’s edge. From this, I created this piece, marking the beginning of what has become an intensive and lifelong project presenting a glimpse of a complex web of relations where humans and the more-than-human engage with the animate earth.

Based in Amherstburg, Ontario, I confront some of our most severe global environmental risks—biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. The Windsor-Detroit area puts me face-to-face with heavy industry, deforestation, biotechnological agriculture, and socioeconomic injustices that have visibly intensified in the aftermath of the pandemic, creating a palpable sense of anxiety about living in today’s world.

– Patricia Coates

Thomas Provost
Lean-To Light, 2024
pine, polycarbonate, brass, LED
Courtesy of the artist

Lean-To Light is a 7-foot tall structure made of cedar, brass, plastic and LED lights. The back-lit, opaque plastic renders a quiet spectacle of warm and depth. Building elements like bracing can be seen as shadows through the work. Seeming familiar, but apart from where they are expected.

Thomas Provost is an architect and designer whose work is curious about industrial artifacts and urban experience. His sculptures and installations are made from everyday materials and invite closer attention to the peripheral structures quietly shaping daily life, such as rail yards, scaffolding, and warehouses. Creating moments of quiet spectacle and evoking a strange familiarity, these structures exist somewhere between infrastructure and atmosphere.

Luyin Li
Echo of Byte, 2025
interactive projection installation
Courtesy of the artist

Echo of byte is an interactive projection installation exploring the relationship between the human body, technology, and visual space. Built with TouchDesigner, the work uses a live camera feed to track bodies in real time, making images that respond to movement.
Projected onto a window facing the sidewalk, visitors can step into the frame and become part of the work. Move and the image moves with you. Lines, shapes, and pulses of light appear as digital traces.

In a city full of lights and shadows, interactive art lets us see how our own presence can shape the space. At night, when light becomes the language of the city, this kind of work creates a quiet dialogue between body, code, and urban atmosphere. Echo of Byte is about making that dialogue visible—and letting people feel it in real time. 

Luyin Li is a filmmaker and media artist living in Windsor. Li’s work explores the connections in technology and art through mixing film, sound, code, and performance.
 “I like to create art that makes people feel connected, curious, and calm. I hope to keep making work that mixes human stories with new technology.” – Luyin Li

Windsor International Aquatic and Training Centre

Jessica Rachel Cook

The Thunderdome, 2025
mixed media inflatable,
courtesy of the artist

Boozhoo! My name is Jessica Rachel Cook, I am an Oji-Cree member of Bkejwanong First Nation with European descent and a multi- disciplined artist. I enjoy creating works of art with cultural icons and knowledge. For this work I have used inflatable material to create a ten foot tall tipi decorated with the image of Mishupeshu, the Thunderbird or Nimkii floating over rainbows with twinkling stars over their heads to honour our ancestors and hearts over the rainbows to represent love.

My thoughts associated with the use of these images is powered by what’s happening in our world today. As an educator, I never thought I’d see the day when the rights of Indigenous people and other vulnerable peoples culture and identities are deliberately trying to be erased all over the world.

In Indigenous art & crafts such as beadwork you can see how modern day culture influences the designers subject matter. Clan animals are replaced with favourite cartoon characters such as Scooby- Doo or your favourite sports team. However, we do not see a lot of mass produced traditional knowledge, icons or effigies in mass produced party favours, toys, gifts for ceremonial accomplishments, or even in local architecture.

I call this work, The Thunderdome. This giant inflatable tipi pushes the traditional narrative of the ceremonial and community practice of using tipis as it will be manufactured and not made with traditional materials and created for a festival. The traditional properties of the use of a tipi for a community event remain the same. A safe inclusive space for everyone.

I feel it is imperative that we celebrate diversity in a time of such intolerance and hate where peoples lives are being threatened because of the colour of their skin or who they choose to love. – Jessica Rachel Cook

Happy Sleepy

Crystal King Mantis, 2012
digital video, 2:33, silent
courtesy of the aritsts

These animations are inspired by a series of paintings called The Crystal Kings. The Crystal Kings are avatars of willpower. They grow facet by facet just like crystal grows out of bare rock motivated simply by the desire to exist.

Magda Wojtyra (born Poland 1973, grew up in Scarborough, Ontario) and Marc Ngui (born Guyana 1972, grew up in Windsor, Ontario) are professional award winning artists living in Windsor. Educated as architects, their art practice and life is devoted to research and promote ideal states of self, community, and the built environment. The ideas are presented as paintings, comics, textile art, animation, soft sculpture, photography, toys, digital art, installations, animation, and video and have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Canada and internationally. They have also created numerous design projects, always for educational and non-profit sector clients, including exhibitions about urbanism for design museums, illustrations for children’s books about public space, conceptual and graphic design for education and science conferences, and art courses and workshops for children and adults. Dedicated to DIY and lifelong learning, between 2005 and 2018 they lived as techno-nomads, travelling long term and living for several months at a time in various parts all over the world. At the end of the nomadic period Magda and Marc chose to settle in Windsor because of its rich history, big nature setting, very diverse world culture (the food!), and huge potential as a small city in a growing Canada. – Happy Sleepy