Your Nuit Blanche 2010 Guide: Zone C

By Torontoist

Sometimes creating beauty is as simple as taking something away, and in the case of Kim Adams’s Auto Lamp (above), that something is hundreds—if not thousands—of metal circles from an old Dodge Ram van. Lit from the inside and spinning around on a turntable, the van will become a nightlight for nuit owls. (A Facebook album of process shots show the making of.) Adams has created a compelling body of work using old vans and other vehicles as his starting point, and the rather low-fi purity of Auto Lamp makes it stand out in the sea of interactive multimedia intangibility that seems to permeate Nuit Blanche programming. AH
Think the art at Nuit Blanche sucks? Think you could do better? Speed Art Criticism is your chance to get a shot of face-time with twelve art critics from some of the country’s leading publications (including but not limited to the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and Artforum) and find out whether or not you’ve got chops. The event is organized like speed dating, so you’ve got fifteen minutes to be speed-reviewed. Not for the faint-hearted: the organizers warn that “Speed art criticism is the WWF of intellectual word play. Come spit some bullets.” SS

Image from E-TOWER’s blog

Coming to you from the “go big or go home” school of thought, artists Dave Colangelo and Patricio Davila offer you the chance to help control the CN Tower’s nightly light show in what they are calling “the biggest installation at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche this year.” E-TOWER (above) invites you to text the word “energy” to 667242 to increase the brightness of the lights and the speed at which the colours change. Six participation stations across all three zones will be set up to remind people to participate. It will be interesting to see if there’s any visible evidence of a correlation between your text and the tower’s lights, or if it feels like adding an indiscernible drop to a bucket. AH
We suspect the exhibits at the TIFF Lightbox may provide achy feet with needed rest: Grindbox! offers up a collection of trailers from horror and exploitation films that found audiences at the “grindhouse” theatres near Times Square in the 1970s and at long-gone venues in Toronto like the Rio on Yonge Street. We imagine the vintage previews will provide moments of mirth from the outlandishness of the spotlighted films. JB And since Nuit Blanche will probably field tons of flack for being a dilution of art in the name of popular appeal anyway, we thought we’d latch onto one of those things that has a dubious claim on the title “art” but will probably offer tons of populist fun. Screw it: we love musicals. Singin’ in the Dark will screen musical numbers for group sing-alongs at the Lightbox. It’s family-friendly until midnight, but then keep the kiddies away as the songs take a turn for (what we presume will be) the dirty. SS

The scariest part about Max Streicher’s Endgame (Coulrophobia) (above) is not knowing what the scariest part is. Is it the two giant inflatable clown heads looming down over passersby in a dingy Yonge Street alleyway? Is it their distorted expressions from being compressed inside the cramped space? It is the fact they’re made from old billboards? Or does that simply add to the absurdity of it all? The final reaction could be one of sympathy, amusement, terror, or some combination of the three⎯depending on how many times you saw the movie It as a child. CM
A pair of Toronto artists are going to be erecting a temporary teahouse in the basement of 401 Richmond Street West. The official description of the installation—Kinoko: Suddenly in the Dark, a Teahouse—is light on details. In fact, this might not even be literal “tea” we’re talking about, but some metaphorical analogue. In any case, the idea of entering the basement of an unfamiliar office building for some kind of strange experience in the middle of the night sounds intriguing, whether or not hot beverages are involved. (Please let them be involved.) SK
The Knit Cafe’s track record of charming Nuit Blanche contributions is what puts this year’s Knit Magic on our guide. 2007’s The Late Great Pom-Pom Exchange and 2008’s Knit City were both welcome soft reprieves from the hard edge that Queen Street West seems to take on as the night inevitably transforms from art party to just party. This year, Kristin Ledgett and Iwona Gontarska (the same artists that produced the adorable knitted reproductions of Toronto landmarks including OCAD, the Gladstone Hotel, and the CN Tower in Knit City) are back. Billed as an enormous diorama filled with architecturally inspired sculptures inspired by wild flights of fancy, this could be the perfect spot to slow down and get cozy as you conquer Zone C. AH

There’s something about a bonfire. The heat and light of an outdoor blaze create a bubble of safety and easy community that we could probably use more of in this megacity. A Night at the Round Table (above) will attempt to simulate this experience with a specially designed circular picnic table in Trinity Bellwoods Park, around which performance artists and passers-by will congregate and tell stories. For those who make exceptional contributions to the circle, the artists are promising merit badges. SK
It’s no secret that not everyone is going to “get” some of the Nuit Blanche installations (though, the giant silver rabbit last year was kind of cool). So while your friends are saying a thoughtful “Hmm” to your befuddled “Huh?” check out For Font’s Sake by Swiss artist Patrick Mimran. Simple, stark billboards scattered around the indie art galleries of West Queen West will seek to comment on art rather than be it, with phrases like “Needing an adviser to buy a work of art is like needing a consultant to choose a wife.” The tongue-in-cheek messages not only address the inaccessibility of some of the more experimental works of modern art, but also the skyrocketing popularity of Nuit Blanche among the non-regular art lovers. But if anyone doesn’t like it, they can just Font off. CM
Montreal-based Lalie Douglas’s on-the-move, participatory project The Potential of Objects celebrates the fact that everything inclines towards its own demise. During Nuit Blanche, Douglas will be serving up platters of small, intricately made objects that contain within them the seeds of their own ending, and offering them to participants for their destroying pleasure: paper to burn, things to eat, knick-knacks to smash. In a past incarnation, The Potential of Objects included detailed chocolate birds for consumption. Here’s hoping this year’s exploration of finality proves equally creepy and delicious. SS

Written by Jamie Bradburn (JB), Amanda Happé (AH), Steve Kupferman (SK), Carly Maga (CM), and Suzannah Showler (SS). Compiled by David Topping. Maps by Marc Lostracco.
Images not otherwise credited are courtesy of Nuit Blanche, or the websites of their respective artists and exhibits.