The 2010 installment of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche is just around the corner and what better way to juice excitement about the October 2 all-nighter than to look back at some of the astonishing work and moments that have unfolded during the past four annual feasts of contemporary art.
Fern Bayer, left, one of the original zone curators in 2006, has pulled together a retrospective exhibition called Some Enchanted Evenings on display in Scotia Plaza (40 King Street West) featuring text and photo panels along with “artifacts” from year’s past.
“Nuit Blanche is an ephemeral event by its very nature,” says Bayer, “so it was difficult to find works and by the same token we didn’t want to reconstruct works because they were specific to Nuit Blanche. But there are six big installations that I would call performance residue. So we have five mascot costumes, above, from Jon Sasaki’s 2008 performance piece at Lamport Stadium. We have one Dream Machine from Geoffrey Farmer’s installation last fall.”
In fact, when I reached Bayer by phone on Friday, she was at her dining room table sewing the banner that appears over the Farmer installation, above. Forty works are represented in the show — a fraction of the 600 that have been staged at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche since 2006.
Whittling that list was a tough challenge confirms Bayer: “I reviewed all the projects and eventually some ideas percolated to the surface, themes or trends that recurred over the various years. One of those themes was Sites With Past Lives, where artists made works that dealt directly with the site as opposed to just putting works there.”
Fujiko Nakaya's Fog In Toronto (2006), photo by Chrysanne Stathacos
“Fujiko Nakaya’s Fog, above, had references to the buried Taddle Creek that still runs below Philosopher’s Walk, so her work referenced the lost waterway, as it were. And then there was Millie Chen who lived on Darcy Street during her childhood and at Nuit Blanche 2007 she did projections inside various houses that summoned her memories of living there. There were a number of works that dealt with these themes.”
In the final two weeks before Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2010, Live With Culture will feature interviews with each of this year’s four main exhibition curators. In addition to Fern Bayer’s look back at past events, a lecture series featuring some of Toronto’s most thoughtful artists and curators will unfold between September 28 and October 3.
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