Taking place on Feb. 29, the phenomenally popular all-nighter gives Montrealers “a very big, very open menu from which you can choose whatever tempts you.”
Art
Nuit Blanche is all about making art accessible, all night long – Montreal Gazette
Nuit Blanche is a concept tailor-made for Montreal.
Back in 1989, the Helsinki Festival kicked off something called Night of the Arts, a similar idea in which folks could check out museums, art galleries and bookstores in a single night. Nuit Blanche came to life in 2002 in Paris, and once again the focus was on contemporary art.
Nuit Blanche began here in 2003, and organizers gave it a unique Montreal twist. Like events in Helsinki, Paris and some 120 other cities around the world, our Nuit Blanche has a contemporary art component, but there is much more to the all-night event here. It features a wide array of cultural genres, notably music, virtual-reality installations and standup comedy. Because it’s Montreal, the bottom line is that it’s one big party — and better yet, almost everything is free.
“We really adapted La Nuit Blanche to the spirit of Montreal,” said Laurent Saulnier, vice-president of programming at L’Équipe Spectra, which organizes the event.
“The spirit of Montreal is all about partying, let’s admit it,” he said. “People here like to party, especially by the end of February, when it’s been a couple of months of days getting dark too early, Arctic cold, etc., etc. People want to go out. So we give people the perfect excuse to go out — a wide variety of activities in all sorts of different places, and the vast majority of them are free of charge. It’s pretty cool.”
This year’s Nuit Blanche takes control of the city centre Saturday night into Sunday morning. You can sample an astonishing amount of culture — everything from electronic-music DJs Tokimonsta and Whipped Cream at Place des Festivals to Canadian paintings from the 1980s at the Musée d’art contemporain, a virtual-reality adaptation of Franz Kafka’s terrifying novella The Metamorphosis at the Goethe-Institut, and drag queens performing out on the street in the Gay Village.
“La Nuit Blanche is for me a very big, very open menu from which you can choose whatever tempts you,” said Saulnier. “There are loads of people, for example, who use La Nuit Blanche to move their bodies, because there are places where you can skate and do other sports. For others, La Nuit Blanche is all about the joy of going to a museum at midnight and discovering the museum at an unusual time of day. For some, La Nuit Blanche is simply synonymous with the word ‘party.’ … It’s a menu where absolutely everything is possible.”
Nuit Blanche’s outdoor site featured a dance floor in 2015. Events this year range from museum visits to DJ sets and virtual-reality installations.
Peter McCabe /
MONTREAL GAZETTE files
Roughly 300,000 people participate in Nuit Blanche each year. By way of comparison, a huge day at the Montreal International Jazz Festival attracts maybe 100,000 to 150,000.
“We think that it’s the day of the year when there’s the biggest number of people who go out, where there’s more people than on any other day who have decided to do something other than sitting at home watching Netflix,” said Saulnier.
Nuit Blanche is also spreading across the city more and more. The first edition happened only in Old Montreal and downtown. This year, the party is hopping downtown (including the underground world of the Art Souterrain festival) and in the Quartier Latin, the Gay Village, Hochelaga, Plateau-Mont-Royal, Mile End, Montreal North and Old Montreal.
Whatever the neighbourhood, the philosophy remains the same: it’s about making culture accessible to everyone.
“Whatever you like, I’m convinced that you’ll find at least one activity that will appeal to you,” said Saulnier. “But on Nuit Blanche, why not go do something you don’t normally do?”
That might mean going to the Canadian Centre for Architecture; checking out DJs and immersive installations at the Phi Centre; watching some of the best TV commercials from the past year as part of Les Lions de Cannes 2019, playing at Théâtre Outremont until 3 in the morning; sampling art videos in the Musée d’art contemporain exhibit Points of Light; or watching performances by drag queens Sasha Baga, Wendy Warhol and Ayzisse Baga on Ste-Catherine St. near the corner of Atateken St. in the heart of the Gay Village.
The 12th edition of the Art Souterrain festival kicks off the same night and fits in perfectly with Nuit Blanche, given that both are dedicated to making the arts more accessible. The festival showcases art in underground settings, including Complexe Guy-Favreau, the Palais des congrès, the World Trade Centre and Place Victoria.
“We always launch the night of Nuit Blanche,” said Art Souterrain founder and director general Frédéric Loury. “We kind of take advantage of this winter event that’s built around free events.”
One of the centrepieces of the festival this year is what they’re calling a Giant Escape Game — a kind of Journey to the Center of the Earth treasure hunt in which participants try to figure out puzzles as they travel through the underground city.
“People will be asked to answer questions about the works of art they see, and so it’s like a treasure hunt but built around contemporary art,” said Loury. “There are no prizes at the end. It’s all about the pleasure of participating, and it’s for people who maybe don’t go to art exhibitions that often, so they can appreciate works of art and maybe better understand the backstory around these works of art. They’ll be like investigators, trying to discover the truth behind the works of art.”
AT A GLANCE
Nuit Blanche takes place the evening of Saturday, Feb. 29 through the early hours of Sunday, March 1, presented as part of the Montréal en lumière festival. For more information, including programming details, see nuitblanchemtl.com or montrealenlumiere.com.
Art Souterrain opens Saturday, Feb. 29 and continues through Sunday, March 22. For more information, see artsouterrain.com.
Related
Continue Reading
Art
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Since joining a community that dreams of an internet free from giant corporations that can exploit users’ time and data, Victoria West’s digital artwork has been exhibited across the globe.
West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, 30 kilometres southeast of Fredericton, has had her work shown in Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Townsville in northeastern Australia, Miami, New York City, and even a museum in Albuquerque, N.M., — all through connections she’s made in Web3.
West warned it was a “rabbit hole,” but what she found in wonderland she doesn’t believe she’d find anywhere else.
Web3 is a future version of the internet.
WATCH | Step inside Eden’s Dye, Victoria West’s NYC exhibit:
The work of Victoria West, a photographer and digital artist based in Burton, was recently showcased at an immersive exhibit in the Big Apple.
Web1, West said, was the first version of the internet, in which users passively consumed information.
As the 2000s dawned, Web2 emerged, and users could now post their own content — think Twitter, blogs, YouTube. People are now creating more and more in digital spaces, but the downside of Web2 is that corporations are technically still the owners of all that creation, and they could take your data and potentially do with it as they please.
Enter Web3, which still exists more in theory: nobody and everybody owns the internet. This version aims to be decentralized. It doesn’t eradicate the distrust some people have in mega companies like Google and Meta — it just removes the need for it, because no one person or organization can own the blockchain Web3 operates on.
West said within Web3 there’s an art movement, with artists working together and taking control of their work. Imagine if Leonardo da Vinci had an internet connection, as well as Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello. It’s the renaissance all over again, West said, except it’s happening with digital art.
“And it’s happening online on a much bigger scale.”
Before learning about W3 in 2021, West said she was in a photography bubble.
Photography isn’t the art form West imagined herself pursuing when she was younger. But when she bought a camera after the first commercial digital models arrived on the market in the mid-2000s, she was hooked.
“I was bothering everybody around me to take their portrait,” she said.
She built up her portraiture business, becoming involved with the Professional Photographers of Canada and competing in photography contests. Still, West didn’t want to just capture moments — she wanted to make them.
That’s when artificial intelligence came on the scene.
West was using Midjourney, a generative AI program, when it was still in beta testing. Around the same time she became involved with Web3, she experimented with blending AI-produced textures into her photography. In her business, AI quickened her workflow and allowed her to change backdrops and furniture.
While creating a piece in 2023 called When I Die, West wanted to design a man underground with roots blossoming into a tree. Well, there aren’t any blossoming trees in Canada in February, West joked — so she made the tree using AI.
“I feel like someone took handcuffs off me, and I’m free,” she said.
Lauren Cruikshank, an associate professor in culture and media studies at the University of New Brunswick, has spoken about the use of AI in universities, but she also thinks about it through an artistic lens.
From the camera to spell check, Cruikshank said the same discussion happens with each new medium: how much of the artistry belongs to the artist, how much to the tools they’re using?
“For some people where it gets uncomfortable is where the role of the human is minimal compared to how much the AI tool is creating or having creative influence,” she said.
With AI, Cruikshank agreed there are degrees — there’s a difference between prompting an AI to generate an image of a beautiful sunset and claiming it as your artwork and what West is doing, combining AI with her own artistry.
“That sounds really compelling to me,” Cruikshank said.
When West first saw Lume Studios on Broadway in lower Manhattan, the place she’d eventually display Eden’s Dye, her immersive art exhibit, she knew she wanted it immediately.
She collaborated on the exhibit with some of her Web3 friends. Los Angeles actors and poets Laurence Fuller and Vincent D’Onofrio wrote poetry to accompany each piece of art, which West created using both photography and AI. A coder friend joined the crew, and the result was a floor-to-ceiling immersive exhibit. West’s collaborators also choreographed performances to complement the art, using music produced by AI.
“Why wouldn’t I do that if I can?” West asked. “It’s freeing, I think, and lets you push the boundaries of photography and what you can do with it.”
While the exhibit leaned heavily on romantic, classical themes and Baroque aesthetics, Eden’s Dye is almost a premonition: minted, digital artwork taking up entire walls in people’s homes, flowers growing from code, experiencing art in virtual realms.
Demand will only grow, West said. Technology will progress and the internet will change. But what she really wanted was for people to walk into Eden’s Dye and be amazed by the art they were experiencing.
“They came because of the art, and they were there enjoying the art. You don’t really need to understand anything beyond that.”
/* OOVVUU Targeting */
const path = ‘/things-to-do’;
const siteName = ‘wellandtribune.ca’;
let domain = ‘thestar.com’;
if (siteName === ‘thestar.com’)
domain = ‘thestar.com’;
else if (siteName === ‘niagarafallsreview.ca’)
domain = ‘niagara_falls_review’;
else if (siteName === ‘stcatharinesstandard.ca’)
domain = ‘st_catharines_standard’;
else if (siteName === ‘thepeterboroughexaminer.com’)
domain = ‘the_peterborough_examiner’;
else if (siteName === ‘therecord.com’)
domain = ‘the_record’;
else if (siteName === ‘thespec.com’)
domain = ‘the_spec’;
else if (siteName === ‘wellandtribune.ca’)
domain = ‘welland_tribune’;
else if (siteName === ‘bramptonguardian.com’)
domain = ‘brampton_guardian’;
else if (siteName === ‘caledonenterprise.com’)
domain = ‘caledon_enterprise’;
else if (siteName === ‘cambridgetimes.ca’)
domain = ‘cambridge_times’;
else if (siteName === ‘durhamregion.com’)
domain = ‘durham_region’;
else if (siteName === ‘guelphmercury.com’)
domain = ‘guelph_mercury’;
else if (siteName === ‘insidehalton.com’)
domain = ‘inside_halton’;
else if (siteName === ‘insideottawavalley.com’)
domain = ‘inside_ottawa_valley’;
else if (siteName === ‘mississauga.com’)
domain = ‘mississauga’;
else if (siteName === ‘muskokaregion.com’)
domain = ‘muskoka_region’;
else if (siteName === ‘newhamburgindependent.ca’)
domain = ‘new_hamburg_independent’;
else if (siteName === ‘niagarathisweek.com’)
domain = ‘niagara_this_week’;
else if (siteName === ‘northbaynipissing.com’)
domain = ‘north_bay_nipissing’;
else if (siteName === ‘northumberlandnews.com’)
domain = ‘northumberland_news’;
else if (siteName === ‘orangeville.com’)
domain = ‘orangeville’;
else if (siteName === ‘ourwindsor.ca’)
domain = ‘our_windsor’;
else if (siteName === ‘parrysound.com’)
domain = ‘parrysound’;
else if (siteName === ‘simcoe.com’)
domain = ‘simcoe’;
else if (siteName === ‘theifp.ca’)
domain = ‘the_ifp’;
else if (siteName === ‘waterloochronicle.ca’)
domain = ‘waterloo_chronicle’;
else if (siteName === ‘yorkregion.com’)
domain = ‘york_region’;
let sectionTag = ”;
try
if (domain === ‘thestar.com’ && path.indexOf(‘wires/’) = 0)
sectionTag = ‘/business’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/autos’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/autos’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/entertainment’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/entertainment’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/life’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/life’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/news’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/news’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/politics’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/politics’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/sports’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/sports’;
else if (path.indexOf(‘/opinion’) >= 0)
sectionTag = ‘/opinion’;
} catch (ex)
const descriptionUrl = ‘window.location.href’;
const vid = ‘mediainfo.reference_id’;
const cmsId = ‘2665777’;
let url = `https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ads?iu=/58580620/$domain/video/oovvuu$sectionTag&description_url=$descriptionUrl&vid=$vid&cmsid=$cmsId&tfcd=0&npa=0&sz=640×480&ad_rule=0&gdfp_req=1&output=vast&unviewed_position_start=1&env=vp&impl=s&correlator=`;
url = url.split(‘ ‘).join(”);
window.oovvuuReplacementAdServerURL = url;
These aren’t your grandma’s quilts.
Being a grandmother herself, Lorna Costantini said she’s not a huge fan of the above phrase, but she can’t help but use it to describe modern quilting.
Already a Subscriber? Sign in
Art
Art and Ephemera Once Owned by Pioneering Artist Mary Beth Edelson Discarded on the Street in SoHo – artnet News
This afternoon in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood, people walking along Mercer Street were surprised to find a trove of materials that once belonged to the late feminist artist Mary Beth Edelson, all free for the taking.
Outside of Edelson’s old studio at 110 Mercer Street, drawings, prints, and cut-out figures were sitting in cardboard boxes alongside posters from her exhibitions, monographs, and other ephemera. One box included cards that the artist’s children had given her for birthdays and mother’s days. Passersby competed with trash collectors who were loading the items into bags and throwing them into a U-Haul.
“It’s her last show,” joked her son, Nick Edelson, who had arranged for the junk guys to come and pick up what was on the street. He has been living in her former studio since the artist died in 2021 at the age of 88.
Naturally, neighbors speculated that he was clearing out his mother’s belongings in order to sell her old loft. “As you can see, we’re just clearing the basement” is all he would say.
Photo by Annie Armstrong.
Some in the crowd criticized the disposal of the material. Alessandra Pohlmann, an artist who works next door at the Judd Foundation, pulled out a drawing from the scraps that she plans to frame. “It’s deeply disrespectful,” she said. “This should not be happening.” A colleague from the foundation who was rifling through a nearby pile said, “We have to save them. If I had more space, I’d take more.”
Edelson’s estate, which is controlled by her son and represented by New York’s David Lewis Gallery, holds a significant portion of her artwork. “I’m shocked and surprised by the sudden discovery,” Lewis said over the phone. “The gallery has, of course, taken great care to preserve and champion Mary Beth’s legacy for nearly a decade now. We immediately sent a team up there to try to locate the work, but it was gone.”
Sources close to the family said that other artwork remains in storage. Museums such as the Guggenheim, Tate Modern, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Whitney currently hold her work in their private collections. New York University’s Fales Library has her papers.
Edelson rose to prominence in the 1970s as one of the early voices in the feminist art movement. She is most known for her collaged works, which reimagine famed tableaux to narrate women’s history. For instance, her piece Some Living American Women Artists (1972) appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1494–98) to include the faces of Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Yoko Ono, and Alice Neel, and others as the apostles; Georgia O’Keeffe’s face covers that of Jesus.
A lucky passerby collecting a couple of figurative cut-outs by Mary Beth Edelson. Photo by Annie Armstrong.
In all, it took about 45 minutes for the pioneering artist’s material to be removed by the trash collectors and those lucky enough to hear about what was happening.
Dealer Jordan Barse, who runs Theta Gallery, biked by and took a poster from Edelson’s 1977 show at A.I.R. gallery, “Memorials to the 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era.” Artist Keely Angel picked up handwritten notes, and said, “They smell like mouse poop. I’m glad someone got these before they did,” gesturing to the men pushing papers into trash bags.
A neighbor told one person who picked up some cut-out pieces, “Those could be worth a fortune. Don’t put it on eBay! Look into her work, and you’ll be into it.”
Follow Artnet News on Facebook:
Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward.
Business14 mins ago
Bitcoin's latest 'halving' has arrived. Here's what you need to know – Business News – Castanet.net
Media19 mins ago
Trump Media warns Nasdaq of suspected market manipulation – CNN
Art1 hour ago
This N.B. artist joined an online movement. Now her art is being shown across the world. – CBC.ca
Investment4 years ago
Silver investment demand jumped 12% in 2019
Media10 months ago
12 Bizarre Things People Did Just To Make Social Media Content
3 years ago
Global Media Markets, 2015-2020, 2020-2025F, 2030F – TV and Radio Broadcasting, Film and Music, Information Services, Web Content, Search Portals And Social Media, Print Media, & Cable – GlobeNewswire
-
Media20 hours ago
DJT Stock Rises. Trump Media CEO Alleges Potential Market Manipulation. – Barron's
-
Media22 hours ago
Trump Media alerts Nasdaq to potential market manipulation from 'naked' short selling of DJT stock – CNBC
-
Investment20 hours ago
Private equity gears up for potential National Football League investments – Financial Times
-
Real eState12 hours ago
Botched home sale costs Winnipeg man his right to sell real estate in Manitoba – CBC.ca
-
News19 hours ago
Canada Child Benefit payment on Friday | CTV News – CTV News Toronto
-
Business21 hours ago
Gas prices see 'largest single-day jump since early 2022': En-Pro International – Yahoo Canada Finance
-
Art24 hours ago
Enter the uncanny valley: New exhibition mixes AI and art photography – Euronews
-
Politics21 hours ago
Iran news: Canada, G7 urge de-escalation after Israel strike – CTV News
