TIFF 2008
KELLY MARK (Union Station, 65 Front West)
Art Feature

Nuit Blanche: Zone B
By Fran Schechter
Wayne Baerwaldt ups the spook factor for Honest, curating installations that are sentimental and eerie in the downtown business district, in the larger zone bordered by Spadina, Queen, Parliament and Lake Shore.
 

KELLY MARK
(Union Station, 65 Front West)

Mark is the Toronto conceptual artist responsible for the unoccupied house on Palmerston that glowed with eerie TV light in 2005. The subject of a mid-career retrospective at Justina Barnicke Gallery last winter, she has an installation on now at Wynick/Tuck. Her art explores the passage of time and the repetition of seemingly pointless tasks, and she’s recently taken to creating mashups of the ultimate pointless time-wasters: movies and TV. For Horridor, installed in a 20-foot-long corridor at Union Station, she projects screamers divorced from their horror-movie context, promising a childbirth-like primal scream experience.
 

NOAM GONICK
(Commerce Court, 25 King West)

The Winnipeg-based film director of Hey, Happy! (a queer DJ tries to trigger the Apocalypse by having lots of sex) and Stryker (a boy’s journey through the ‘Peg’s native street gangs) and co-creator with Luis Jacob of Wildflowers Of Manitoba (a homoerotic hippie installation now at Justina Barnicke) brings an outdoor film work to Commerce Court. In each multi-storey projection, a stand-up comedian poses as an executive. The giant faux CEOs interact with each other and with the dwarfed audience in the plaza below, perhaps offering some advice on the current financial crisis.
 

SHUVINAI ASHOONA, JOHN NOESTHEDEN
(Pedestrian walkway/Teamway, York south of Front) 

Zone B curator Wayne Baerwaldt originally brought this pair together for this spring’s Stadthimmel (Citysky) in Basel, a project that saw artists’ banners with a sky theme hung over the Swiss city’s streets. The Saskatchewan-based Noestheden, who contributes the “sky” part of Earth And Sky, has been making conceptual, astronomy-inspired paintings, sculpture and installations for years. Ashoona, the granddaughter of pioneer printmaker Pitseolak Ashoona, is one of several northern artists bringing a savvy contemporary sensibility to Inuit drawing and printing, in her case focusing on semi-abstract depictions of the Arctic land. More of their collaborations are on view at Feheley Fine Art.
 

MATT MASTERS, TERRANCE HOULE, 2boys.tv
(Cathedral Church of St. James, 65 Church)

Don Coyote, a multimedia cabaret performance that riffs on both Cervantes’s Don Quixote and sidekick westerns, is the work of Calgary duo Masters, a country & western singer in the band Gentlemen of the Rodeo, and Houle, an Aboriginal artist and director of the short film Metrosexual Indian, who’s part of this month’s ImagineNative shows at Trinity Square Video and A Space. It was a hit at the Glenbow Museum this summer. Montreal queer performance duo 2boys.tv (aka Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard), who use lip-synching and drag, add their roving ritual Quixotic to the party. 
 
Want to know what's worth seeing this Saturday night during Nuit Blanche? Follow NOW's twitter feed and sign up for SMS alerts, (they're free, aside from your regular fees), and don't end up waiting 30 minutes for a dissapointing end, don't hit up packed installations, don't miss something exciting that's happening one street over!

Follow NOW's twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nowtoronto/
NOW's Nuit Blanche site: http://www.nowtoronto.com/nuitblanche

 

NOW | September 30-October 7, 2008 | VOL 28 NO 5
Copyright 2009 NOW Communications
NOW Magazine. Covering culture where it happens.
Go back to Toronto Nuit Blanche 2008
Post a comment :

All comments are reviewed.

Nuit Blanche Toronto Coverage

Nuit Blanche Toronto Coverage