There’s a free outdoor light-based art exhibition currently on display in Toronto where visitors can check out the illumination of several unique light installations.
Lumière: The Art of Light festival has transformed Ontario Place’s Trillium Park into a huge art display where guests can experience 17 interactive light installations every day of the week from sunset to 11 p.m.
The free festival is a perfect night out for art lovers wanting to see exhibits come to light or who are looking to explore the city. Lumière is bringing locals and visitors together to revel in the beauty of Toronto’s vibrant visual arts.
The exhibition is compiled by 17 talented Ontario-based artists and creators and is meant to showcase innovation, creativity, light and discovery. They were asked to design a project under the theme “Connections” which encourages people to think and interpret the way light can connect people, the environment and different aspects of one’s life.
Now Toronto spoke to a few of the artists featured in this year’s exhibition, including Christina Kayastha who is the creator of “Virtual Visage.” She says her piece is about how we connect with each other in a digital era.
”It’s inspired by the hashtag #nofilter. When we appear online, we often tend to use filters or AI generated or digitally assisted media in order to portray ourselves or connect with each other. So, this piece is trying to challenge participants against that,” she said.
“It’s trying to say, when we connect with each other digitally, how can we be more authentic? How can we be our true selves? And so, the piece actually has two sides to it. On one side, it represents our reality, and the other side represents our digitally modified cells. And so as participants interact with it, they’re trying to see, how do they modify their faces when they appear online?” she continued.
This year marks Kayastha’s second time being a part of the festival. Last year, she presented a piece called “Bloom Promenade.” Similarly, this year marks the second time Melissa Joakim is participating in Lumière, and she created her interactive piece titled “Trail.”
“It’s an array of vectors on a bridge and when you approach the piece from one side, one side will light up. When you approach the piece from the other side, the other side will light up. But if two strangers happen to cross the bridges at the same time, then they have an ultimate rainbow effect,” Joakim said.
“I hope that when people experience this piece that they connect with people around them. I think that it’s a really great way to look at Trillium Park in a different way,” she added.
Joakim encourages people to visit the festival not just for the artwork but also to see the park itself as it’s a hidden gem and offers the best view of the Toronto skyline.
“I think people crave connection and that they want to find a reason to be part of a community. I think that this festival and the way that the artists have come together around the theme of connection, there’s really something here for everybody,” she said.
Lumière is free to visit at Trillium Park until Apr. 20 from 6:30 p.m to 11 p.m., seven nights a week. Bonfires will also be hosted at the park’s fire pit from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. every Friday and Saturday.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
