Four must-see spectacles at Nuit Blanche 2014
Wondering which of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche’s 130 installations to cram into your art-themed all-nighter on Saturday, October 4? Here are four unmissable picks—one from each of the night’s exhibition zones. (Still overwhelmed? Just head to a Screaming Booth.)
Walk Among Worlds (pictured above)
Location: Ogden Junior Public School, 33 Phoebe St.
Zone: The possibility of everything
The world will be at Ogden Junior Public School on Nuit Blanche—quite literally. For Walk Among Worlds, by Mexico City–based Argentine artist Máximo Gonzáles, the school will be outfitted with 7,000 inflatable globes, one for every million people on the planet. The globes will be in three different sizes, as a way of representing the distinction between the first and third worlds.
Between Doors
Location: Fort York, 100 Garrison Rd.
Zone: Before Day Break
Nuit Blanche is expanding into Fort York this year, and Between Doors, an interactive installation from Toronto’s Labspace Studio, is making the most of the wide-open space. In this rumination on the nature of choice, participants will choose between a series of freestanding doorways, each of which leads to more doorways, and so on, while a large screen tracks and maps those choices overhead, revealing unexpected patterns and parallels.
2YouTopia
Location: Nathan Phillips Square Parking Lot, P1, 100 Queen St. W.
Zone: Performance Anxiety
Adapted from a 90-minute theatrical piece staged in 2013, Vertical City’s 2YouTopia will see a lone performer, Kiran Friesen, navigate a decaying maze of construction scaffolding and piping suspended over water in City Hall’s parking garage. “Abstract issues such as the nature of the imaginary world and the performer’s relationship to space have to be thoroughly revisited,” artistic director Bruce Barton says of the adaptation, “but so do very pragmatic issues such as exhaustion and bodily functions.”
8th Wonder
Location: Union Station Great Hall, 65 Front St. W.
Zone: The Night Circus
American artists Brian Kane and Michael Oatman aren’t revealing much about 8th Wonder, their “social sculpture” in Union Station’s Great Hall—which is why we’re so interested. There will be interactive, musical, performance, video and sculptural components, but we’re not still sure what the unrehearsed, not-to-be-repeated piece actually is. “It’s a beast of a sculpture,” Kane says in a promo video. “Let’s just say that.”
Watch short video of some of the art installations.
https://vimeo.com/108059072
Nuit Blanche – Stay Away!
#nuitblanche #art #culture #toronto http://ow.ly/CkmwL
Stay away from Nuit Blanche!
Nuit Blanche is like a big wonderful art scavenger hunt for students. Too bad most of the students weren’t interested in finding the art.
We were in Toronto Saturday to see The Book of Mormon, and discovered to our delight that the Nuit Blanche outdoor art installations were in town too. After the play, we decided to wander around and have a look at the outdoor art. But after viewing about a half dozen installations, we gave up exhausted from battling the crowds of students. I heard afterward that a million students (and about ten adults) had attended Nuit Blanche on Saturday night.
Although I wouldn’t recommend Nuit Blanche to anyone interested in art, I thought it was great to see so many young people wandering the streets and having fun. I hope a few of them took a little time to appreciate some of the art as well. I wonder if the sponsors of
Nuit Blanche would be interested in hosting a second outdoor art installation night for adults. They could call it White Night to avoid confusion.
Stay away from Nuit Blanche unless you’re a young person interested in walking around downtown Toronto with a million other young people.
http://larsemorrison.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/nuit-blanche-stay-away/