Mario Martinelli and Raji Aujila: Meeting The Shadow
The Spoke Club, 600 King West
Italian artist Martinelli uses a starkly simple premise and digital technology to haunting effect. Pedestrians pass between a high-powered floodlight and a large white screen their shadows, captured as they pass by, are digitally frozen onto the screen’s surface. Nuit Blanchers have a chance to turn and scrutinize them while they slowly fade. A fleeting and strangely intimate piece. DJ
Adam Bialo: The Death Of Queen West
Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen West
Between 2009 and 2011, Bialo documented the condos rising in the Queen West Triangle from the window of his loft in studio building 48 Abell. He’s been working on this five-minute film since the building’s demolition, weaving together time-lapse images of construction, footage of artistic life at Abell, the wild eviction party and the building’s eventual tear-down into a bittersweet valedictory for the vanishing Queen West art scene. FS
Spectrum Music: Interface
Artscape Youngplace, 180 Shaw
This experimental music showcase combining touch, improvisation and sound features a different improvisatory musician every hour, standing in the middle of a circle of eight speakers equipped with sensors. Audience members touch the sensors, activating computer-generated loops of sounds and samples that in turn change the direction of the improvisation. Listeners can thus direct and co-create with the musicians throughout the night. DJ
Barbara Greczny, Esther Buckareff and Michelle Breslin: Sex Worker, Truth & Archetype
Beaver Hall Gallery, 29 McCaul (continues to October 23)
This timely assumption-busting documentary project’s subjects come in a variety of ages, genders and ethnicities, and work in porn films, escort services, massage parlours and internet chatrooms. Using an open-consent form that built trust and allowed the sex workers to control how they’re represented, filmmaker Buckareff recorded candid interviews presenting a forthright bunch of people who enjoy their jobs, sound designer Breslin created a musical piece played in the gallery called The Longing, while in Greczny’s photographs sex workers pose as their fantasy selves. FS
Girls Learning Code: Envision
The Lab, 483 Queen West
Computer geeks may have been ridiculed in high school, but now they run the world, and a very male-dominated world it is. Girls Learning Code is about empowering a new generation of women to crack the glass ceiling in infotech. Envision showcases the works of 40 eight-to-14-year-old girls who each programmed and designed her own 3D printed object. See them displayed inside a giant 30-foot wire sphere. DJ
Belmont house and Neel Desai: This Light Of Mine
401 Richmond West
Belmont House, a home for people 85 to 95, has an innovative arts therapy program that encourages residents to create art across a variety of media. For this exhibit, they were asked to portray one personal memory through a unique medium. The artists hope to shift perceptions surrounding the elderly and the aging process. DJ
Antonia and Iullia Kostiuk: Sand Animation Show
George Brown School of Design, 341 King East
Combining painstaking draftsmanship and cutting-edge concepts of animation, the Kostiuk sisters draw on sand scattered across the surface of a light box, forming figures patiently and with consummate skill. Their entire process unfolds in real time on several projected screens so the audience can watch as forms emerge organically in dynamic narratives of transformation. DJ
Mary Dyja: Fungal Overtake
Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen West
Crafting takes on an ominous tone as Minsk-born Canadian textile artist and recent York BFA grad Dyja, wearing a yarn mask that marks her as infected by the encroaching menace, fills a hotel room with organic-looking, chaotic crocheting that mimics fungal growth. Working throughout the night, she interacts with viewers and invites them to touch her work. FS
Daniel Samson, Paul Dhir and Matthew Ryan Smith: Gyan Chauper
Fort York, 100 Garrison
Local choreographer Samson, architect Dhir and curator/art prof Smith collaborate on a large-scale version of Gyan Chauper, an ancient Indian board game designed to teach morality lessons and how to overcome passions in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. During the Raj, the British appropriated the game for what we now call Snakes And Ladders. You become a life-size game piece, your karma influencing your progress around the board. FS
A Wall Is A Screen: Tearing Down Walls
Goethe-Institut Toronto, 100 University, walking tours 8 and 11 pm
Inaugurated at the 2003 Hamburg Short Film Festival as a way of revitalizing downtown business districts after dark, AWIAS now travels to cities internationally to put on walking tours that pause to project short films selected to work with the locations. The German group has curated a program for the Goethe-Institut’s Grenzfall – Tearing Down Walls, a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition to the two walks, non-mobile screenings run all night outside Goethe-Institut. FS
