2013 Scotiabank Nuit Blanche

I went to Scotiabank Nuit Blanche again this year. It's an annual all-night contemporary arts and culture exhibition held normally on the first Saturday of October here in Toronto. It's the 8th time it's been held here. I believe I've attended every year since the start.

This year it was slightly different for me. Instead of going to a bunch of different installations throughout the evening, I was part of one of nine teams of photographers and videographers hired by the folks at the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art (CCCA) to take pictures (or videos) at five different installations. Mine were C11 - Smoke House, C19 - Display-Displace, C28 - The Soniferous Æther of The Land Beyond The Land Beyond, C29 - Pink Punch v.2, and C34 - Mariner 9.

I went down early because I wanted to talk to the artists to see what their displays were about and if they had any particular instructions or direction of what they wanted me to shoot. Only two of the five artists were actually there though. For the other three I either talked to a helper or one of the Nuit Blanche volunteers assigned to that particular installation.

After doing my rounds I headed over to Nathan Philips Square to kill a bit of time before the action heated up. Ai Weiwei had an installation, Forever Bicycles, there. It consisted of 3,144 interconnected bicycles forming a shiny, three-dimensional structure. I took a bunch of pictures there before returning to shoot my assignment.

The first one I shot was C11 - Smoke House. It was on Richmond Street, east of York. The artists had constructed a large-scale cedar smoking hut powered by three bicycles. Participants were invited to pedal throughout the night to keep the salmon smoking and ultimately served the smoked fish. It was the best installation to shoot because there was a lot of audience participation.

The next installation I shot was C19 - Display-Displace. My CCCA contacts gave me the wrong address for that one. They said it was 130 Richmond Street when it was actually 130 Adelaide Street. So, needless to say, I had some trouble finding it.

It was the worst installation to shoot. The artist had rejigged three pieces furniture in the lobby of an office building. The thing is, no one was allowed to go in to view it. They had to look through the building windows. So I couldn't get any audience interaction.

Even when I gained access to the building the security guard said I had to stand behind the perimeter barriers to shoot it. And if people had been allowed into the lobby I wouldn't be able to take pictures of them. That was pretty stupid. I don't know why they had this particular set up. The Nuit Blanche volunteer who was assigned to this particular installation thought it was ridiculous. She was quite upset at having to oversee it. Most passersby didn't even realize there was an installation here. And when they saw it weren't at all impressed.

Next was C29 - Pink Punch v.2. For this installation the artist had wrapped six trees along the courtyard at First Canadian Place on King Street West in bubble wrap with pink LED lights underneath. It was so-so. I got some okay shots, but the construction vehicles parked on the street behind the installation sort of ruined some of the pictures I thought.

C28 - The Soniferous Æther of The Land Beyond The Land Beyond was nearby in the lobby of First Canadian Place. It was a film installation shot at the CFS ALERT Signals Intelligence Station on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, the northernmost settlement on earth. It was the only real indoor installation I shot. There had been some warnings by the weather forecasters about the possibility of rain this evening, so I was hoping for more indoor shoots. But the weather actually turned out to be quite good. It only sprinkled a few times.

Finally I made my way to C34 - Mariner 9. It was a video installation where the artist set up a 12-metre-long panoramic view of a Martian landscape set hundreds of years in the future, littered with the rusting remains of various missions to the planet. It was neat to look at. I think it was the second best installation for me (out of the five) to shoot. There were benches for the audience to sit on to watch it. A number of people went up to the screen to take pictures of themselves standing in front of the "Martian" landscape.

After that I went back and shot the whole thing over again. They wanted us to get shots at different times with different people viewing the installations. It was the second time around the Smoke House that I bumped into Richard's brother, Kerry. He accompanied me the rest of the evening.

At 5:30 I ended up crashing on the couch at his mother's condo instead of going back home. It made more sense than taking the subway back up to my place and then having to turn around and come right back down to go to church a few hours later.