Paper Girl
Arielle White, Tanya Chilova, Ece Budak
Extra, extra, read all about it! The work, which alludes to images of a paperboy delivering newspapers, uses ‘mail art’ as a way of exposing local artists through word of mouth. This interactive piece grabs the attention of the public with its community-orientated nature. The paper girls, riding bicycles, toting satchels full of works by local artists, would disperse them at random until they run out, all to increase public awareness of Toronto talent.
—Sarah Ciantar
The Mission Business
Byron Laviolette, Martha Haldenby, Trevor Haldenby, Elenna Mosoff, and David Fono
The massive, interactive narrative of a fictional biotech company, ByoLogyc made a public appearance to present the next part in its story of survival: Patient Zero.
ByoLogyc, started by York theatre PhD candidate Byron Laviolette, is an interactive story revolving around the product ByoRenew, an antivirus pill released into the body, claimed to protect the user from 90% of everyday ailments and sicknesses.
The project itself, being three years in the making, has made several appearances in the past. The story will conclude November 2-3 at Evergreen Brick Works, answering the central question: pill or no pill?
—Arian Shahnavazy
Cent une tueries de zombies
Michael Lane, Colin Geddes
Headless bodies walking, devouring brains; red paint for fake blood; hammy acting—screened in the TIFF Bell Lightbox, this film is a patchwork collection of 101 zombie deaths from cinema and television through the ages. Showing their progression until modern day, the film attempts to demystify their popularity. Juxtaposed with throngs of zombies gaining on innocent civilians, ancient audio of radio broadcasters warning the public of epidemics plays over top. Think of Stephen King’s “let’s-slow-down-and-watch-the-accident syndrome”: that which we fear, we are also fascinated with.
—Leslie Armstrong
Outsiders 2012
Seeingred
What does it feel like to be an outsider in Toronto? How do Torontonians treat them? Outsiders 2012, a mobile art
installation, poses questions about how we treat strangers. Seeingred, a group of Toronto-based artists, created 50 life-sized, human-shaped plastic beings, representing the outsider. As the night progressed, these figures were let loose from the installation site at Eaton Centre, and dispersed throughout downtown. The figures wore tags which read, “I am an Outsider. Take me with you, pass me along.” The artists invited people to look within and identify the outsider in them.
—Chandni Shah
Earth–Moon–Earth
Kate Paterson
A lone piano sits in the middle of a stage in the Elgin Theatre playing a broken melody, unoccupied, attached to dozens of wires. The melody is Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” and the composition of the song is sent to the moon in morse code and reflected back to the earth. In this Earth-Moon-Earth transmission, some of the notes get lost in space, and some return out of tune. The chords are soft, but the melody is not quite right. Regardless, a new composition is created—an acquired taste.
—Leslie Armstrong
The Vault
Thomas Blanchard
‘Trippy’: one of the many words to describe The Vault, a photo-based work centered on the tensions of creation and destruction. The work presents images inside the bottom of a barrel, reflected on the barrel’s metal interior. The work creates different terrains, such as oceans and forests, to convey the central themes. Viewers also had the opportunity to put their head inside the container to better see the images for a kaleidoscope-like experience. The fast-moving images also created the surreal experience of a portal. Overall, it was an interesting display of life in suspension.
—Habiba Abudu
Dada Reboot
Thom Sokoloski
A collaborative work, it celebrated and payed homage to many of the most famous works of Dada in the Distillery District.
Dada does not self-identify as an art movement. It is anti-art—a rejection of aesthetics and culture, initiated by artists and thinkers in the aftermath of World War I, its horrors still fresh in their minds. Determining that no society of value could have committed such heinous acts, they sought to escape its values.
In one of the more unique pieces, a small wooden gallows stood, with a pull rope attached to a large wooden hand, awaiting a viewer to read the sign informing them anyone who pulled the rope would get slapped, and to pull at their free will.
The anti-art lasted through the night as the [anti] artists came together to revive and reboot the ideas of Dada.
—Mark Grant
Museum for the End of the World
Janine Marchessault
Mounted at various points around Nathan Phillips Square and City Hall, Museum for the End of the World plays on creativity and chaos. This section of Nuit Blanche displayed works united by the theme of ‘Doomsday,’ hosting work such as The Vault, Quasar 2.0, and World Without Sun, among others. These compiled works play upon the ironies of human existence, which almost anticipate an apocalyptic end.
—Sarah Ciantar
