This year, we are partnering with the Gardiner Museum
and the Humber School of Creative and Performing Arts to present a joint project called
Future City – an imaginary public square of a future Toronto, if it were run by artists. In this future city, your civic responsibility is to give a little art in order to get a little art.
In DD’s corner of the City is “Nice Bumping Into You,” co-created by spoken word artists Heather Hermant and glass artist Melina Young, and we asked them explain the installation in their own words.
Here is part one of a three-part interview we’ll be posting this week.
DD: Explain what you will be doing at Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.
Heather: Melina Young and I have created a poetry performance fused glass installation piece called "Nice Bumping Into You". I know, "poetry performance fused glass installation"? That's a mouthful. DD had proposed the idea of "give a poem-take a poem" as an exchange with participants. So I was thinking about how to think outside of the expected from that idea. I was imagining the Gardiner Museum, the presence of precious tactile objects in glass cases throughout the building, and
also about the presence of windows, up the stairwells and especially on the third floor. Glass seemed like a perfect medium for the venue. So together with Melina Young, we came up with the idea of a light table dining room place of gathering, with fused glass tiles as the medium of exchange for words, for conversation. These tiles are inspired by the "post-it note".
Post-it notes are little portable containers for memory, for quick thoughts, pieces of a larger puzzle that can be easily moved around to complete an idea. Post-it notes are disposable, crushable in an easy way. But the fused glass incarnations that Melina has made are gorgeous, glowing, vibrant objects that are very tactile, verging on three-dimensional and very inviting of touch. There are about one hundred of these tiles, which though they appear really precious are actually really sturdy, not fragile, and together they compose a single image that's about ten square feet.
When you add handwritten text onto the tiles with marker, in response to the tiles themselves, in response to the room, to the experience of the city that evening, to the people at the table with you, there's a whole other layer of puzzle to be mixed and remixed, so that the image takes on whole new dimensions and ceases to be what it started out as. There will be a lot of markers available, and the text is erasable, so the experience that is being tracked, the relationships and thoughts and exchanges recorded in the moment, all of it is ephemeral, subject to uncertainty.
There are yet two more components to this installation. First, the activity on the table will be videoed from above, and projected, rendering the activity--the hands, the text, the tiles--as a kind of moving painting, like a blurry reflection of colour in a pool of water as an instant record of performance. And then there's the more obvious kind of performance. There's me the commissioned spoken word artist, and my job that night as a poet is to undertake a collaborative poetry marathon within this installation. I'll have spent a good while responding to the tiles myself in the lead-up to Nuit Blanche, and so I'll have a body of spoken word already created. The night of, I'll facilitate, in a way, the ever-changing gathering of people at the table in the hope that I can foster potential collaborations for short impromptu performances at intervals over the course of the evening, with the material the table generates as the source of the performances, and with participants and myself as performers.
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