Top 4 Nuit Blanche exhibits
From sunset to sunrise, Nuit Blanche, an all-night contemporary arts festival, lit up Toronto’s downtown core on Saturday with bright and creative displays of art. Listed below are four of the most memorable pieces from the event.
Photo credit: Jaclyn Tansil
Name: Death of the Sun
Artist: Director X
Address: 100 Queen St. W. (City Hall)
Director X’s sphere-like sculpture represents the Sun through the various stages of its life cycle. Designed to make the viewer contemplate their own spot in the universe, the orb dwarfs those who stand next to it, boasting a circumference of 45 metres. This exhibit is part of the OBLIVION projects, which according to the curators Janine Marchessault and Michael Prokopow is about “destruction, forgetting, and drowning in the pitch blackness of pure and final absence” as well as “adaptation and unprecedented renewal.”
Photo credit: Mark McKelvie
Name: Pneuma
Artist: Floria Sigismondi
Address: 100 Queen St. W. (Nathan Phillips Square)
Also a part of the OBLIVION collection, Pneuma uses a combination of projectors and water to display themes of life, death and life after death. The artist, Sigismondi, graduated from OCAD University who says she got the idea from “a walking dream that unlocked something boundless and idyllic from [her] unconscious.” The exhibit looped a video that was accompanied by a continuous shower of water that spurted out onto the sides of concrete, covering spectators that went too close.
Photo credit: Jaclyn Tansil
Name: Luzinterruptus
Artists from Madrid, Spain
Address: Hagerman St. and Elizabeth St.
Assembled with donated books from the Salvation Army, Luzinterruptus stretched the span of a whole city street to honour the power of literature. The books had light fixtures placed inside of them that gleamed in the darkness, and visitors who came in the last couple hours of the night were able to take a book home.
Photo credit: Mark McKelvie
Name: The Merging
Artist: Nicola Verlato
Address: 100 McCaul St. (OCAD University)
Description: Verlato’s The Merging shows the difference between the left brain and the right brain using two prominent Toronto historical figures: Marshall McLuhan and Donald Coxeter.
It merges McLuhan’s discipline of social sciences and Coexeter’s discipline of geometry to form a hybrid, connected scene. Inside OCAD was another installation of the same painting, this time with access to virtual reality tools to make the pieces pop even more. Participants could enter into the realm of the painting, exploring the setting in a 3-D space.
