I rarely say 'I could make that' whenever I see art in the wild, but Nuit Blanche always manages to be the exception.
I remember when one of the art exhibits in Nathan Phillips Square was just pallets of garbage. There was a very long description of what the pallets meant. Alex said "They just dropped off literal garbage on the ground and called it art."
And they really did.
It is clear that 2026 was a poor year in terms of funding. I am pretty sure the local TDSB grade 3 classroom got more funding for their art program than Nuit Blanche did this year. The cluster of exhibits were mostly situated in Old City Hall, and one other location. Some of the exhibits were *cough* "re-imaginings" of previous years. This would be less of an eye-roll if there wasn't a literal horde of artists who would love to be a main display at Nuit Blanche.
Here are pictures I took of the displays I saw and my feelings of them.
The idea was interesting, but it really was just a projector slide show of random thoughts.
This was supposed to be an inflated seal skin. Once I knew what it was, I thought it was pretty cool. Otherwise, I thought of it as kind of like an alien balloon? I thought it was an alien....
This was an 'activation' (marketing) by Crayola for their crayons. There was a 200 PERSON LINE-UP TO DRAW ON CARDBOARD. Congrats to Crayola, you tapped into the Toronto desire to stand in line.
I thought this was interesting, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought about how it was all on Hudson Bay blankets, and this bothered me for some reason. I think the images on them are nice, though, and some thought was put into this.
This blown up square was a genuinely cool idea. It was all about the forgotten and closed landmarks in Toronto, like Sam the Record Man or Ontario Place.
The was a Grandma memory garden hanging in the sky and it was pretty cool.
When I read about this, I thought it was the stupidest idea I ever heard. Looking at it in person, though, it was actually really inspiring. It looked like a real accident, where an alien landed in a car. Kudos to the artist, you impressed me.
One of the coolest things was the Y2K party that looked amazing, that I was too tired to wait for it to open at 1030pm.
After looking at the art, I took pictures of other things that inspired me that night.
The AGO Leather Elephant that is made of copper always impresses me. Even Alex was impressed, he had never seen it.
I just need to know what Heather did. Art!
The text, the image, the inability to find the door since there wasn't one nearby, chef's kiss!
Random art piece in a corner we walked by on the way to Union Station.
One of the reasons I love Nuit Blanche is that it really forces you to walk around your city and look. And we did a lot of looking. Saw lots of cool things, but definitely not enough.
Sometimes art is what you find on the way to look at other art, and that is half the fun of an event like this.
