Annual Nuit Blanche photo essay returns
Gleaner art director Neiland Brissenden’s annual chronicle of Nuit Blanche returns this month. Previously featured on the newspaper’s Twitter feed, Brissenden’s photo essay highlights installations that interacted with the audience to celebrate some of our neighbourhood’s most loved faces and spaces. —Annemarie Brissenden/Gleaner News
Beloved idols returned to Mirvish Village as the Plywood Collective painted a mural outside Markham House.
Small lit houses, luminous lightboxes, and a disproportionate music box featured in Maison/Home by Claude Miceli and Jean-Christian Knaff inside Markham House.
A tin can phone sculpture connected viewers with the work and each other in the interactive Conversational Partner by Allie Brenner and Laura Snider in the Honest Ed’s parking lot.
Made of natural cotton by artist Gloria Stein, River: The Shroud of Buczacz, was a 16 foot by 24 foot topographically accurate scale model of the site in Poland where 1500 Jews were murdered during the course of one night in early spring 1943. Stein’s father, then but a small child, managed to survive the massacre, but the poisoned river would feature in the nightmares of the Holocaust that would haunt him for the rest of his life. The shroud both concealed and revealed as it reminded the viewer of the story’s saddest relic, that “many parts of our precious earth are still being poisoned with the blood of innocent victims”.
Crowds wait to enter Cushion: An Interactive Media Womb by F_RMLab at the Bata Shoe Museum. The installation replaced the “buzz of the city” with “a space of reflection”, as visitors interacted with “friendly beings” in an “atmosphere created by touch, light, and sound”.