I copied this text right from the Nuit Blanche website. Please excuse the quality of the photos and videos. They were taken with my crappy fake blackberry.
Bellwood Trinity Dry Stone Bell
DSWAC - Port Hope, CanadaInstallation, Sculpture, Performance Art, Light Installation
The Dry Stone Wall Association of Canada will build a large stone bell structure without cement, mortars or glue. This ode to craftsmanship will be rung in at 7pm and rung out at dawn. As quickly as it will be built it will disappear like the clanging of a bell.
DSWAC is committed to educating the public and promoting the art of dry stone walling. In a world where structural masonry has vanished, and energy consumptive cements, glues, plastics, and high tech materials are the norm, rejuvenating this craft has become ironically innovative. This method uses a structural and environmentally friendly medium, avoiding toxic materials, extensive industrial processes, and limited CO2 production. Like the bell, stone walls are a ringing in a new ecological age.
Ruby Venus
Michelle Debrouwer - Toronto, CanadaMonica Dottor - Toronto, Canada
Sunshine Horvath - Toronto, Canada
Nicole Rush - Toronto, Canada
Jennifer Helland - Toronto, Canada
Installation, Performance Art
Ruby Venus is a physically interactive dance installation. A highly sculptural work involving 15-30 identical women clad in long red velvet hoop dresses and blonde wigs, the dancers move to a symphony of heavy metal violins in a foreign land. Exploring their surroundings in childlike fashion; afraid to wander too far from the clan. Every hour on the hour they gather to perform a highly choreographed piece and then disperse among the observers again.
-Following the performance of Ruby Venus, a spokesperson for Virgin Airlines gave away plane tickets
Sight unseen, 2010
(Seeing Lee Ranaldo perform made my night. I was so mesmerized I may have peed my pants... almost.)Lee Ranaldo - New York, USA
Leah Singer - New York, USA
Multimedia Installation
Small moments loom cinematic. A pin drops. An exploration of image and sound celebrating the hidden, the lost, the invisible.
Lee Ranaldo is a writer, visual artist and a founding member of musical group Sonic Youth.
Leah Singer, is a visual artist and filmmaker known for her performances using modified film projectors and 16mm film shot with a still 35mm camera.
Their collaborations include: DRIFT, a live film and music performance first premiered in 1991 and recently included in the Biennale for International Light Art in Ruhr, Germany; iloveyouihateyou, a digital video and sound installation, Magasin3 Stockholm and Water Days, a CD+book.
Auto Lamp, 2009
Kim Adams - Toronto, CanadaDodge Ram van 96
A vehicle is supposed to light the way ahead and signal its presence to those behind. Adams shifts Auto Lamp's original functionality to a kind of lighthouse on land, or for this occasion, an oversized lamp for night owls. Placed on a rotating display, the Auto Lamp is signaling in place guiding the viewer to both stay and go. Turn off the car, turn on the light. Turning 360ยบ, the road's line is revised to a slow whirl, a traffic circle of light. Adams' work frequently involves vehicles, but often his sculptural intervention is additive, the vehicle outgrows its bounds and becomes a bemusing behemoth. Staging a surplus of scenes colliding in a multitude of scales, the resulting sculptures are pure excess. Auto Lamp suggests a new direction for Adams, here the process of subtraction he employs similarly produces an excess, but of the immaterial. Light beams puncture the auto's body and pour out in all directions — the patterned pores of all sizes create a mesmerizing decorative display. The vehicle's consistency is compromised, it's barely there, it's more holes than whole.
Church Intent
John Notten - Toronto, CanadaInstallation
Using the vocabulary of camping equipment, Church Intent recreates a Gothic Cathedral. The glowing interior invites participants on an all-night secular pilgrimage into a space with towering, vaulted ceilings made of simple dome tents and adorned with camp stoves, coolers and canoes. The heavy permanance of cathedrals are made portable and lightweight, as common camping gear is re-fashioned into 'sacred' objects. Nuit Blanche's nocturnal ebb and flow of a virtual sea of people transform the space into a 12 hour performance as the long, stop-and-go procession of the 'faithful' through this 'church' casts shadows on the translucent walls. Exploring perceptions of faith, spirituality and institution, Church Intent playfully celebrates the ironic relationship between the Church and the tent.
