Man, what a letdown Nuit Blanche ended up being. We rode the Queen streetcar through Zone A and saw the light installation at City Hall, which I'd read was pretty impressive, but not at that particular moment. Then we walked right through Zones B and C and saw nothing interesting.
In Trinity Bellwoods Park, there was a light wall with coloured plastic bottles that you put in the wall like a LiteBrite and there was also a DJ crew spinning music, neither of which were all that interesting. We walked the stretch of Queen where all the galleries are and a few had artists creating on site, but not many. Seeing a guy work in wax on paper was probably the highlight of the night.
Zone C was the biggest letdown. People on bikes dragging stuff behind them? A shipping container with wire trees in it?
Maybe my expectations were a little too high, but I don't think that was the case at all. I think maybe (like most grassroots events that hit it big) the dream and the execution ended up being very different things. To be as big as advertised, the event needs more big installations that really wow people, not a lot of the kind of stuff we can see in any gallery on any given day.
The other highlight of the night, something that ALWAYS works at Nuit Blanche, was wandering around with friends. We had a few drinks together, caught up with one another and laughed and laughed and laughed. So in one sense, it was a pretty good night.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Art.
I spent about 5 minutes at the installation at City Hall. It would show four letters on a giant light display, then a voice that could only be described as a really slow T-Rex would say the letters or the 4-letter word. But it never formed a real word. Only stuff like "QZXY" and "LUTG". Plus the left side of the second letter wasn't working, so B's looked like 3's and N's looked like V's.
I'm just glad that I wasn't staying at the Sheraton on the northside … super annoying light thing.