2012 Scotiabank Nuit Blanche Independent Projects in Zone C

Natasha Bailey

Speed Date with Natasha Bailey, Performance

Location: Tequila Bookworm, 512 Queen St. West

Natasha Bailey, From T to T

Performance artist Natasha Bailey shares her curiosity about her audience: “I want to learn more about who they are, their interests, likes and dislikes.” With this in mind, Bailey has designed a performance that requires the audience to fully interact with her – the performer. She will invite Nuit Blanche art seekers to take part in a five-minute Skype speed date. Seated at two respective computers, the audience member and the artist communicate by typing. However, their communication is restricted to typed chat – a reflection of how texting and Internet-based dialogue has replaced most face-to-face encounters. Consequently, this performance highlights technology’s cause of human disconnect by forcing both parties to engage in a intimate encounter with limited personal interaction.

Bentley and Simon Jarvis

Memory Cubes, Installation

Location: Roma Rush, 504 Queen St. West

 

 

 

 

 

Bentley and Simon Jarvis, Memory Cubes

Created by Bentley and Simon Jarvis, a father/son multi-media production team, this multi-media, interactive installation captures images of passersby and applies them to “memory cubes,” suspended cubes in a storefront window that bounce and spin around their artificial “landscape” like dry leaves. When they collide with each other or with the walls, they trigger evolving electroacoustic sounds. The memory cubes gradually pile up into trembling drifts as the night progresses.

Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Sean Procyk and Christina Zeidler 

Night Kitchen Under the Tabletop, Multi-media installation 

Location: OCAD University, Main Building

 

 

 

 

Sean Procyk

Inspired by the children’s storybook written by the late Maurice Sendak, where a boy dreams of surreal, late-night experiences inside a bakery kitchen, Night Kitchen welcomes the audience into OCAD University after dark. Responding to the past and present of this site, these performance and installation projects address the systems at work within the institution. Each artist offers an immersive experience. Their site-specific works are tailored to interior spaces, reflecting on the systems of the institution and its architecture. Three artists’ projects become part of the infrastructure to playfully feed audience members through registration, structural procedures and doctrines. Using cooking and digestion as metaphors, Night Kitchen invites a reflection on the processes, hierarchy and identities seemingly inherent in art and educational institutions.

Hybridity

Street Language, Installation

Location: Queen and Soho

Hybridity, Street Language

Street Language explores the visualization of identity, large scale projection, collaborative experimentation and audience interaction. The installation invites participants to visualize themselves and communicate with others on the facade of  a wall, creating an enhanced platform for shared experience.

Elliott Mealia, Staceylee Turner and 

Brenhan Mc Kibben

The High-Five Championship, Performance

Location: Campbell House Museum, 160 Queen St. West

 

 

 

 

Watch a satirical spectacle in ‘professional’ high-fiving, in the garden of historic Campbell House, transformed into a 1970s-style sports arena for the night. Visitors are invited to act out their dream of being a professional ‘high-fiver,’ complete with weight-class, HFC nickname, and to the winner: Championship title and bragging rights.

A dynamic display of characters, light, sound and spectacle, The High-Five Championship takes the smallest gesture and amplifies it to the status of professional glory. Torontonians will cheer this awesome world championship between heroic superstars and dubious villains.

Adam Nashman and Nicola Pantin 

The Sitting, Dance performance

Location: The Rivoli, 334 Queen St. West

Adam Nashman and Nicola Pantin, Dances of Offering

Theo Pelmus and Ulysses Castellanos

Passage to the Kingdom, Performance

Location: Queen St. West between Beverley and Soho

Theo Pelmus and Ulysses Castellanos, Passage to the Kingdom

Passage to The Kingdom plays with the concept of an afterlife: what would the other side look like? Will we experience that world as we experience ours now? It consists of a series of “stations” that members of the public are taken through. The performance features a sensorial passageway that serves as an allegory for going into another dimension. The artists play the role of guides through the experience. Theo Pelmus and Ulysses Castellanos, dressed completely in white, play the roles of Televangelist and Ashram Guru respectively. The two “guides” direct the public through the different stations, which culminate in their gifting of diplomas to participants that commemorate their crossing of the “Passageway.”

Street Art Showcase

Concrete Canvases, Installation 

Location: Joe Fresh, 589 Queen Street West

 

 

 

 

Street Art Showcase, Concrete Canvases

Concrete Canvases is a large scale, digital street art installation that examines how we write, explore and, ultimately understand our city through the practice of ‘urban inscription’. Integrating new media technologies with street art practices; audience members will be treated to a unique and engaging interactive Nuit Blanche experience. Presented by Joe Fresh.

Tania Ursomarzo

Working Through Process: Collapsing and Expanding Depth, Installation

Location: Proper Reserve, 498 Queen St. West

Tania Ursomarzo

The video installation uses the interplay of light and shadow as a medium to watch and record time against the backdrop of a building facade. Day becomes night as night becomes day in a video projection superimposed onto the physical site from which theinformation was originally derived. The changing environmental conditions at the site and the layering of real and recorded time transform the depth of the facade’s space with each instant of time that passes. The installation’s presentation makes its perception constantly subject to change as it oscillates between varying spatial dimensions.

Workparty

Dire-Rama, Installation

Location: Duke’s Cycle, 625 Queen St. West

Workparty, This is Where It’s At

Land redevelopment, gentrification, the corporatization of public space, OCCUPY, G20, Tar Sands, climate change, the effects of the ’905′ voters on the political landscape of Toronto,cultural funding and support, cuts to social programs, issues of transportation, energy production and use, public health – the list goes on. Duke’s Cycle will be the site of an old-fashioned, 3D diorama, shop window display that engages with these pertinent Toronto issues within a wider Canadian and global context. The “shop window” provides a suitably iconic and ironic setting for both a seductive aesthetic and subtle but subversive political agenda, especially at a time when our relationship to consumption is in dire need of re-evaluation.