Ottawa's streets have always had a certain quiet poetry to them — the Rideau Canal at dusk, the Glebe humming on a Saturday morning, Bank Street in the blue hour before rush hour hits. Now, one artist is freezing those fleeting moments into something you can hang on your wall.
Martin Brooks spent years working as a mathematician in the high-pressure world of hedge funds before walking away from it all and reinventing himself as a visual artist. More than a decade later, he's channelling his analytical mind in a completely different direction: combining custom-built software with the City of Ottawa's network of traffic cameras to produce large-format photographic prints unlike anything most gallery-goers have seen.
A Mathematical Eye on Familiar Streets
Brooks' debut solo exhibition, Quiet City, features more than 30 prints drawn entirely from Ottawa's municipal traffic camera system — the same grid of cameras that helps commuters figure out whether the Queensway is moving or a parking lot.
Where most people see grainy, utilitarian footage, Brooks sees raw material. He developed proprietary software that processes camera feeds and still captures, extracting texture, light gradients, and motion data to build images that sit somewhere between photography, painting, and data visualization. The results are simultaneously documentary and abstract — you can recognize an Ottawa intersection, but it feels transformed, almost dreamlike.
"There's something beautiful about infrastructure that nobody's really looking at," Brooks has said of the project. The irony isn't lost on him: cameras designed to monitor traffic congestion have become windows into the soul of a city.
The City as Canvas
The prints in Quiet City cover a range of Ottawa neighbourhoods and times of day, capturing the city in moments it rarely gets credit for — empty arterials at 3 a.m., pedestrian crossings mid-flurry, the particular grey-gold of an Ottawa overcast afternoon. The scale of the prints matters too; blown up large, what looked like noise in a low-resolution feed becomes deliberate texture.
CBC Ottawa traffic reporter Doug Hempstead — a man who has spent years narrating the city's roads in real time — visited the gallery and came away genuinely moved. For someone who watches Ottawa's traffic cameras for a living, seeing them repurposed as art offered a perspective shift he hadn't anticipated.
Math Meets the Gallery
Brooks' background in quantitative analysis shapes everything about his process. The software he built isn't a filter or a preset — it reflects years of thinking about pattern recognition, signal extraction, and how data can be rendered visually meaningful. In that sense, Quiet City is as much a mathematics project as it is an art show.
It also arrives at an interesting cultural moment for Ottawa. The city has increasingly become home to a tech-forward creative community, and Brooks' work sits at that intersection — rigorous, process-driven, but emotionally resonant.
Go See It
If you've ever glanced at an Ottawa traffic cam online and felt a flicker of something beyond road conditions, Quiet City is worth your time. The exhibition is a reminder that the city we think we know — the one we drive through on autopilot — is full of imagery waiting to be noticed.
Source: CBC Ottawa
