Getting ready for Saturday
Six artists make final preparations before this weekend’s fleeting Nuit Blanche
Toronto’s annual Scotiabank Nuit Blanche is always a mixed bag — hundreds of artists, almost as many projects, scattered from one end of the city to the next — but one consistency is the flurry of last-minute preparations every one of them undertakes as the overnight art extravaganza’s zero hour approaches.
We stopped in with a handful of artists in the throes of final arrangements before Saturday’s event.
An Te Liu, Solid States
Toronto Sculpture Garden, 115 King St. E. Liu is here at the behest of MOCCA, now adrift and homeless until its new building is finished on Sterling Rd. next year. MOCCA director David Liss said he’d be keen to keep his hands on the sculpture garden in the meantime, to maintain a presence while in limbo.
Here, Liu takes over the garden with a suite of bronze works that echo the primal forms of such artists as Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. The twist: His primal is cobbled from throwaway things; Styrofoam blocks used to protect computers, TVs and the like. The project is for the night but will stick around for a couple of months.
Carlos Amorales, Black Cloud
The Power Plant, Harbourfront Centre Amorales, a Mexican artist, has done this before in France, Spain and elsewhere, but it doesn’t make installing thousands of black paper moths any easier. Nonetheless, he had a head start. Amorales was working to a different deadline — the Power Plant’s fall exhibition openings last Friday — so he’s far from under the wire.
Luis Jacob, Sphinx
Children’s Conservatory, Allan Gardens With the mould freshly off his cast-resin sculpture this week, Jacob, an indefatigable advocate for artists’ activity in Toronto, is ready to make his silent, passionate plea: to remember what was as we make what will be. On the night, ephemera from bygone eras of the city’s development will sit in vitrines, foreshadowing more inexorable change. Looming above it all, the classical nude figure observes, headless, his fingers locked in a frame. He seems to suggest: it’s ours to fill. The question is, with what?
Ekow Nimako, Silent Knight
Gardiner Museum, 111 Queen’s Park Outside the Gardiner, Nimako’s colossal sculpture of a humble barn owl will sit frozen as it alights. Made of thousands of pieces of LEGO in his St. Clair Ave. W. studio, Nimako was still building the wing feathers less than a week before the event. The piece is a paean to loss. The owl, plentiful all over the world, faces erasure here in Southern Ontario, as its habitat gets swallowed by development.
Cyril Williams, Shoes That Line the Lane
Bata Shoe Museum, 327 Bloor St. W. The odd phenomenon of shoefiti — that ubiquitous practice of flinging pairs of shoes up to dangle on power lines — has, thanks to the Internet, gone global. But Williams was introduced to the practice via an elderly friend of his parents, when he was growing up in Manitoba in the 1970s. The man said he had done it as a child himself, in the ’20s, inspiring Williams to do the same. Earlier this week, he was cataloguing the last few dozen; in the night, he’ll take 1,000 pairs of shoes he’s collected, each personal with their own story, and invite members of the public to add to it and share stories of their own.
Mary Mattingly, Torus
231Queens Quay W. (on the water behind the Power Plant gallery) Mattingly’s floating installation, a web of aluminum skinned with translucent material, serves as an ephemeral gathering place, whether by land or sea; during the day, it will float in Toronto Harbour for boaters to visit and at sunset it will be moored to shore, allowing landlubbers a look inside. A poetic gesture isn’t without its pains. In the pouring rain earlier this week, Mattingly and her team wrestled with the object, getting doused along the way.