SLEEPLESS IN STAMPEDE CITY
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"Cloud Stage"
Caitlind Brown with Lane Shordee and Wayne Garrett, "Cloud Stage," installation, 2012.
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"Untitled"
Derek Michael Besant, "Untitled," from the series Fifteen Restless Nights, 2006. Thermal ink on veil scrim fabric.
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"Untitled"
Derek Michael Besant, "Untitled," from the series Fifteen Restless Nights, 2006. Thermal ink on veil scrim fabric.
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"Untitled"
Derek Michael Besant, "Untitled," from the series Fifteen Restless Nights, 2006. Thermal ink on veil scrim fabric.
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"Untitled"
Derek Michael Besant, "Untitled," from the series Fifteen Restless Nights, 2006. Thermal ink on veil scrim fabric.
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"Untitled"
Derek Michael Besant, "Untitled," from the series Fifteen Restless Nights, 2006. Thermal ink on veil scrim fabric.
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"Untitled"
Derek Michael Besant, "Untitled," from the series Fifteen Restless Nights, 2006. Thermal ink on veil scrim fabric.
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"Meatball, Tribute to the Group of Seven"
BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sebastien Giguere, Nicolas Laverdiere), "Meatball, Tribute to the Group of Seven," installation, 2009.
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"Cloud (Nuit Blanche project sketches)"
Caitlind Brown, "Cloud (Nuit Blanche project sketches)," 2012.
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"Carrousel"
BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sebastien Giguere, Nicolas Laverdiere), "Carrousel," installation at MassMoCA, 2012.
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"Cloud Stage"
Caitlind Brown with Lane Shordee and Wayne Garrett, "Cloud Stage," installation, 2012.
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Abigail Taylor
"Each Other Project"
Sophie Farewell, "Each Other Project," 2011. Photo: Eric Moschopedis and Mia Rushton.
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"spitzenrefinanzierungsfazilitat"
Emily Promise Allison, "spitzenrefinanzierungsfazilitat," 2012. Photo: Monika Sobezak.
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Matthias Pick
"Hiding"
Emily Promise Allison, "Hiding," 2012. Photo: Valentin Brovko.
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"Sleep"
Caitlind Brown with Clare Duckett, "Sleep," installation, 2012.
SLEEPLESS IN STAMPEDE CITY
With a Cultural Capital designation and a renewed focus on the arts, can Calgary build and sustain its own Nuit Blanche event?
By Mary-Beth Laviolette
Around the globe, Nuit Blanche — or as it’s commonly translated “Sleepless Night” — is a name charged with cultural cachet and brand appeal. Since its inception in 2002 as a one-night/all-night arts festival in Paris, Nuit Blanche is to contemporary art what Twitter is to contemporary culture: short in duration, engaged with a broad eclectic audience and capable of being both meaningful and inane at the same time — it’s the perfect definition of a mass spectacle.
In Canada, the most highly touted Nuit Blanche is in Toronto where, since 2006, the sunset-to-sunrise celebration of contemporary art has become the nation’s most well-attended art event. It has Scotiabank sponsorship among others, and an audience last year estimated to be around one million, including more than 120,000 out-of-town visitors. The city turned itself into a defacto art gallery, providing temporary space for art installations, performances, exhibitions and every manner of artistic expression. In 2011, there were 130 projects or destinations.
This year, Calgary is joining the Nuit Blanche ritual for the first time on September 15 — a few weeks before Toronto’s gets underway again. Along with Vancouver and Winnipeg, Calgary is the third city in Western Canada to march forward under the Nuit Blanche banner. Though the event has been dismissed as esoteric, the event has given a boost to installation and performance art in all its host cities.
For Caitlind Brown, a Calgary-based multidisciplinary artist and curator with an installation planned for the city’s inaugural event, it means only one thing: opportunity. “It’s an ideal way to create public excitement for the arts. Nuit Blanche Toronto blew my mind as an art student, and I’ve never thought the same way about public installations since. Calgary is on the cusp of a new cultural understanding — I’m hearing it everywhere. The music, theatre and arts communities are maturing, gaining exposure and exploding into visible realms.”
Part of the visibility, at least this year, is Nuit Blanche’s unveiling as part of the roster for Calgary 2012 which is tied to the city’s nomination as Cultural Capital of Canada. Curator Wayne Baerwaldt has been working with a board and a small team, looking after the logistics and organization. Currently the Director/Curator of the Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art & Design, Baerwaldt is doing double-duty with Nuit Blanche Calgary, which has the support of ACAD, City of Calgary Arts and Culture and Tourism Calgary
Baerwaldt already has one Nuit Blanche to his credit. In 2008, he served as curator of 12 projects in Toronto’s Bay Street financial district. For Calgary, organizers have selected five outdoor projects to be clustered around the Stephen Avenue area between the Glenbow Museum and City Hall. A busy pedestrian stroll where civic, business and cultural communities intermingle, food trucks will also be on hand to serve urban fare. Is it time, then, for an all-night party?
ACAD instructor Diana Sherlock, who’s had her own previous artful wanderings in Toronto, is not entirely convinced by the extravaganza of one-night spectacle. “Although there were some very good site-specific, commissioned projects ... much of the art was lost in the mass, party environment. The quality of what was shown, because of all of the related, peripheral events, was also very uneven. You have to commission particular work with this context in mind or the art, and the audience’s experience of it, suffers.”
Sherlock is on the Nuit Blanche Calgary board, whose members Baerwaldt describes as skeptical “to some degree about how Nuit Blanche has unfolded elsewhere.” That includes the 12-hour, 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. format of the Toronto event. In Calgary, the event is scheduled to run from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., and the organization is making $5000 available for each of the five projects, with funding for production coming from other sources. Scotiabank Nuit Blanche juried artists’ projects are paid a $1000 honorarium and up to $3500 in production costs.
For Caitlind Brown, the funds make possible her own unique Nuit Blanche Calgary installation — an interactive illusion of an electrically-charged cloud activated by audience members pulling on metal strings connected to clusters of light bulbs. Over 1,000 bulbs are involved in the fanciful work, crackling, she expects, with lightning-like effects.
The Quebec City-based trio BGL (Jasmin Bilodeau, Sebastien Giguere, and Nicolas Laverdiere), have constructed a carousel out of ubiquitous urban objects like shopping carts and metal crowd barriers. The Calgary version will have six (shopping cart) seats and revolve faster than the one they made for MASS MoCA’s Oh, Canada exhibition in North Adams, Massachusetts. Propelled by volunteer athletes, Nuit Blanchers will ride Carrousel in the city’s Olympic Plaza, while nearby others light-up Brown’s CLOUD.
In all of the projects planned, the intent is to foster social interaction and the experience of art beyond its quiet contemplation in a gallery setting. The art collective called Sophie Farewell has planned a more vocal interchange between individuals. In However you do it…consider the stars, two “town criers” — played by actors — will call out text messages sent by audience members. Each will be positioned on an industrial scissor lift above the audience, and the criers’ performance plays into a concern about the public sphere and the dissemination of information. Or, as collective member Eric Moschopedis puts it, it’s about “who has a voice and who doesn’t.”
ACAD art student Emily Promise Allison is preparing an as-yet-untitled performance art event that will travel in and around the Olympic Plaza space. Her work is about the interdisciplinary relationships between visual art, theatre, and audience. As late night events go, The Candahar may end up being an audience favourite. Created by Theo Sims, the monumental work is a detailed replica of a Belfast pub nestled in a large plywood structure the size of a shipping container. It’s all faux but all real at the same time, as bartenders Chris and Connor Roddy from Belfast will go about their usual business — serving and chatting with Nuit Blanche patrons.
Nuit Blanche Calgary is still very much a work in progress or taking “baby steps”, as Baerwaldt describes it. For next year, there are hopeful plans to run the event during the annual Sled Island Music and Arts Festival. In the meantime, as the groundwork is laid, other programming ideas for the September 15th date are in the works, including the presentation of Derek Michael Besant’s Fifteen Restless Nights. An installation that’s already toured around the world since 2006, the show’s Alberta debut will feature large-scale images, music and voice displayed across the street from Olympic Plaza at MOCA Calgary.
While not quite an all-nighter in Calgary, if the Nuit Blanche concept achieves anything, it’s Baerwaldt’s and the board’s aspiration that it runs counter to how so much of our interaction is mediated today with technology. Instead of staring into iPhones and other devices, people are encouraged to have “real contact with real artists in a very specific place and time.” Baerwaldt hopes to emphasize that “there is a real difference between what people mean by connecting.”
CALGARY: CULTURAL CAPITAL
By Heather Setka
This is Calgary’s year, and the city’s visual arts community is reaping some of the rewards. Celebrating centennials for artistic and public institutions, Calgary is also Canada’s designated Cultural Capital for 2012. “Calgary is defining what a Canadian city is going to look like in the future,” says Karen Ball, executive director of Calgary 2012 — a non-profit formed to manage the designation’s funding and programming.
Competing against other Canadian centres, Calgary received the Canadian Heritage designation based on “an ongoing commitment” to arts and culture. For the city’s visual artists, the designation has meant an infusion of grant funding (the total budget for the project is approximately $4.5 million), as well as local and international recognition.
Kai Scholefield is a member of the glassblowing collective Bee Kingdom. Calgary 2012 funding sent Bee Kingdom to Pictoplasma — a Berlin arts festival Scholefield calls “an animator’s dream” — as representatives of Calgary’s glassblowing community. He says that as a result, Bee Kingdom “exported the credibility and legitimacy” of the local scene to Germany.
In another Cultural Capital initiative, the AiR (Artist in Residency) program lifts artists from their (typically) solitary art-making spaces and places them in public ones, if not necessarily ones considered bastions of culture.
“The purpose is to expose Calgarians to the creative process where they go naturally,” says Ball. Old Trout Puppet Workshop — the self-professed “motley gang of artists” that has combined visual art with theatre since 1999 — is hosting a residency in the Chinook Centre shopping mall for sculptor and video artist Noel Begin.
Michael Green, Calgary 2012 curator and creative producer, says Old Trout initially applied to host Begin on its own. Meanwhile, Chinook Centre applied separately as a residency spot. Green says the mall’s desire to participate was so unusual that he needed something “equally bold” to match it, and he joined the two together. The residency takes place in February 2013.
