Luminato 2012 - Visual arts & food program

Visual Arts has been around since the beginning of Luminato since 2007 with a very similar mandate in that they have always been free and outdoors for the most part. We are doing a large scale multi-location exhibition. Something very Luminato really. Blue Republic is doing a text-based project, and in Brookfield place they are working Toronto philosopher Mark Kingswell to commission a text which which raise questions about what a city is, and how we react to the city. The text will be mounted on the floor, all over this huge space here. And the idea is to treat this text as a maze. It forces you to walk around and move around the space. It acts through color and it acts through shapes, and the direction of the text itself. We are also doing another piece at the airport. And it is in front of a large dinosaur skeleton that belongs to the Royal Ontario Museum. The poem that we chose for that is called “Dinosaur Skeleton” and it's a very funny, very smart, and interesting poem. Dan Bergeron is a Toronto-based artist, who used to go more under the name “fauxreel”. But has been doing a lot of works lately, and our history with him goes back to 2008. Essentially, he is creating using a very common medium, which is the condo A-frame sign board, which you see all over the city now. To actually use that as a medium to create large scale sculptures. I chose to make my sculptures so they related not only to the condo industry, and the housing industry, but also to the material, which is ½ inch plywood, the size of the material and the fact that it has advertising on it. And these sculptures will be installed in various locations, and there will be everything from sort of a re-thought park bench, to a chess table and stools that people can sit on, to incredibly large sculptures that really call into question issues of housing around the city. It gets residents and visitors alike to think of the city as public spaces that are shared spaces, and to think of them in a more interesting way other than the utilitarian purpose that public spaces are often regarded as. Our artist in residence is Dan Bergeron and he’s been working with schools and youth and the general community in Regent Park and St. James Town over the last three months actually on special projects that are inspired by his style and creative process related to his ‘re-ply’ installation. The community outreach portion of the project is really important because it gets it gets kids interested in their neighbourhood, and it gets kids interested in a neighbourhood that doesn’t have alot of public art. And since that Regent Park is going through such a huge revitalization, we really want the kids to get excited about the possibilities of what their new community can be. We have one very large project, which is very exciting because it really blends the boundaries between disciplines which is something we are have been focusing on this year. It’s a project by Austrian artist Rainer Prohaska. He’s been working on this project since February when he did a research period in Toronto, looking at food and art, and combining the two. The project is called “Toronto Carretilla Initiative.” The idea is to have a flexible kitchen, because basically in this installation the audience has to cook the meals. So to make that possible we have to split recipes into very small working spaces so whenever you want to change a recipe you have to change the kitchen. The shopping cart is perfect for that. And you can assign each step to a shopping cart, and then design that kitchen around that step, so you have a chopping cart, a mixing cart and a cooking cart. And you can put them together to form various sculptural configurations, which can also cook a recipe which the public comes with Rainer and actually partakes in each step of the cooking stage and produces a meal together. This year, we really wanted to look at President’s Choice 1000 Tastes of Toronto and kind of get back to the roots of kind of challenging the restaurants to do something really unique, and present it in a setting where the public can feel free to sit down together at one long table which we are going to provide, where they can eat this idea of a communal meal together. One of the awesome things that we have is that we have a stage set up here and I am going to be running interviews and question and answer sessions with some of the key players in Toronto’s food community. And we have a kids panel to talk about young kids and their relationship with food. We are also going to talk to artistic director of Luminato, we’re going to talk to Rainer Prohaska about his awesome art installation here on site. We have such a wide variety of flavours for you to choose from. We have the folks from Amaya making dreamy Indian food, we have Thai food, we have chinese food, we have Japanese flavors, there are lots of Mexican and Peruvian flavors that will be there, as well as beautiful french pastries which everyone loves. There is lots of programming for all ages, and there are some intentional programs to engage families together around recipe collection, cookbooks and that kind of thing, which I am really excited about. There is absolutely something for everyone. And the other thing is that we are licensing the site, so this year we are actually toying with how to pair wine and pair drinks with specific food items and really taking a curatorial approach to the good program. I think Luminato Festival is great for the city of Toronto, because it gets people out and about to areas of the city that they wouldn’t normally go to. Normally, when I do a big festival, they probably book like 2 performances and have maybe 2 or 3 nights. Here we have 9 performances, so it’s all over the whole festival. We are hoping that everyone who wants to participate will be part of this experience. You get the art outside the gallery walls. You kind of surprise the public with these art installations, and you also win a new audience because there is no barrier to the artwork. It's in the space you traverse everyday, and suddenly there is this new thought-provoking artwork in the space that really declares that the festival is in the city.