Artist and architect Tomer Diamant, left, was thrilled when his independent project, Rescue Bubble 2009, was accepted by the Scotiabank Nuit Blanche curatorial committee to be among the nearly 200 projects featured in the 2009 installment of this all-night art extravaganza. If all goes according to plan, on Saturday night and Sunday morning, Rescue Bubble will be a giant, orange beacon glowing at the centre of the intersection of Liberty Street and Mowat Avenue.
Constructed of common traffic pylons Diamant’s bubble will be 3 meters high and 4.5 meters across. It will be heavy; too heavy to simply pick up and move from its construction berth in a nearby parking lot to the centre of the intersection, which cannot be closed until 6:55 pm, the official beginning of Nuit Blanche. That small but significant executional wrinkle necessitated the design of a rolling platform that would allow the structure to be moved 20 meters.
“It should work but we won’t know for sure until Saturday,” says Diamant. “So if you see it in a parking lot and not in the intersection it’s because the contraption failed.”
The concept behind Rescue Bubble dovetails beautifully with the Zone C theme of Urban Disaster / Catastrophe / Survival Actions. “In a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, pylons are indigenous to the site,” notes Diamant. “So it will be this very big thing made out of a constituent element. After I got the initial idea, I began to see pylons everywhere, to notice how really ubiquitous they are. Once you have a reason to notice them, you’d be shocked to see how many you pass by every day, unclaimed pylons that have been abandoned for different reasons. They’re in the most public spaces and yet they’re invisible.”
There’ll be nothing invisible about this traffic pylon. Diamant says although he’ll explore some of the other Nuit Blanche exhibits he’s looking forward to “spending some time at my project, to see people’s reactions.”
“I think Nuit Blanche is a really amazing event but at the same time people’s reactions to public art can be funny, even if on some level they like it, it’s always easy to dismiss. In a weird way that’s part of the kick people get out of the event. Artists put their work out there and the public will judge it how ever they will. So I’m looking forward to hearing some disses because I’ve definitely dispensed some of my own in my day.”
Unlike the vast majority of Nuit Blanche installations that will go up and come down within the space of a single day, Diamant’s bubble has been selected to live on, at least for a short while. On Sunday morning, the artist and a team of volunteers will disassemble the piece and move it to Burlington’s Royal Botanical Garden where it will be re-constructed for a month-long exhibit.
The structure is self-supported on a series of rings made of common plastic tubing. Diamant’s training as an architect helped facilitate the design: “Technology gives us all these tools to help with the design process,” he observes, “but then when you actually have to go out and build it, you’re bluff is called and that’s when it gets interesting. Hopefully it will all work out.”
Photos of Tomer by Christopher Jones; Rescue Bubble pics courtesy Tomer Diamant
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