.: Painting the Night Red for Nuit Blanche (sleepless night)

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Painting the Night Red for Nuit Blanche (sleepless night)

No, the buzz you've been hearing around Toronto is not a plague of locusts. It's all about Nuit Blanche. Everyone who's anyone will be there, don't you know? Nuit Blanche, "a free all-night contemporary art thing," returns for its second year on Sat, Sep 29 starting at 7pm and running until 7am on Sunday morning.

Since Nuit Blanche in Paris 2002, the event has become an international phenomenon with festivities taking place from Latvia to Spain.

Toronto's Nuit Blanche is much expanded this year. One of the more notable additions is the creation of Nightless City on Church St. Appropriately enough, Nightless City promises to bathe the strip in red light, transforming every little corner into a street-wide theatre spectacle. Event organizers are calling it "a grand erotic fantasy," which, depending on what you are into, could also describe any given afternoon on Church St.

The start of Nightless City will be announced by a singular horn and drifting mist. "The intent of this project," says project curator Kristyn Wong-Tam, "is to create an experience for the observer that embodies the restrained yet carefree and celebrated environments that the 'floating world' afforded the tradition-bound shoguns during Edo [now Tokyo] in the 16th and 17th century."

Calling herself "a bit of an East Asian history junkie," Wong-Tam first got involved in Nuit Blanche as co-owner of XEXE Gallery, keeping the gallery doors open all night at last year's event. "I distinctly remember getting goose bumps when I realized that, in the wee hours of that morning, I felt that Toronto had finally achieved some of that worldly status that we have been claiming to have for decades."

Unlike other Church St events such as Pride or the Fetish Fair where performances are on stage, Nightless City performances will happen in storefronts and right on the street. Viewers are encouraged to dress in their own interpretation of what a red light night could mean, blurring the lines between spectators and participants. "There are no steadfast rules for Nightless City," says Wong-Tam, "aside from try, taste and touch everything."

The Nightless City will feature multimedia installations and modern dance to aerial acrobatics, opera, puppetry, improvisation and even psychic readings. Many businesses will stay open all night and a number of bars have extended serving hours (till 4am). A full listing of Nightless City performers can be found on the Church-Wellesley Village BIA website at Church-wellesleyvillage.ca/nuitblanche.

And then comes the next day......

Note: All images and text (not specified) is copyrighted by Christopher Cushman. Text for this post was gleaned from xtra magazine/Toronto. This site does not specify or denote the sexual orientation of any model and as such please post your comments accordingly.

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The Dance Through Life Project

Photograph project dedicated to capture the Art of Dance within the parameters of everyday life. The project hopes to capture the innate relationships between dance and everyday life. Images of dance performed in non-traditional locales hopefully demystifying dance as being inaccessible and drawing the obvious metaphor that while all can not express life with such movement and physicality, we all love with our own signature grace. Therefore we all dance.

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Through New Eyes: The Photography of Christopher Cushman by Rinaldo Walcott

The Black male body remains an enigma despite its over representation in the public sphere. The dominance of hip hop culture globally, driven in part, but not exclusively by the innovative sounds of rap music have made Black men a standard by which Black men and other men judge themselves in contemporary culture. However, there is a paradox, because despite the prevalence of hip-hop’s popular global impact, Black men are also still some of the most despised men in Western culture. Stereotypes of criminality, disease and danger still abound and organize Black men’s lives, even within hip hop culture. Thus representations of Black men tend to be much more restricted, than open-ended. The struggle to bring Black men into complex open-ended representations has been an on-going historical struggle. One of the most potent forms of representation in the last one hundred and fifty years has been the photograph. Photography has offered the promise to represent the real in a manner that has both seduce its viewers and baffled them with its artifice. Black male photographic representations in the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first have promised to rescue Black men from the confines of mis-representation and stereotype. One of the most difficult and complicated circumstances of Black male representations has been in the realm of representing their sexuality. Black men’s sexuality is still over-burdened by a perceived threat and danger, especially now in the hyped-up era of the downlow. Then along comes Cushman. I first hear of Christopher Cushman’s photography from my boyfriend. He told me of a guy who was taking photographs of black nudes based upon how they wanted themselves to be seen, not how he posed them as his models. When I met Cushman he confirmed that he did indeed work from the models’ suggested posed and not impose his own. The idea is a great one because it allows the models agency in choosing what they believe to be an adequate representation of who they are. While it is now true that in contemporary culture subjects have learned to play for the camera, offering us artifice on command, this artifice can be understood as exposing inner senses of self and being. Cushman’s photography captures and reveals those inner desires. Look at me, many of the models seems to say. But look at me anew, is also what they seem to project and insist on. Cushman’s eye lavishes these Black male bodies with glimmers of light revealing their nuance personalities. While most of the men are naked their individuality comes clearly through. And yet, their eyes too reveal that they belong to a community, a family and possess desires, fantasies and needs. In these photographs, as viewers we are given new eyes to see beyond our inner voyeur. Cushman channels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Rotimi Fani-Kayode and many other artists, commercial and amateur photographers who seek to rescue the Black male body from the disastrous depths of mis-representation, and who almost always fall short. The conversations that his models create between his work and others whether unconscious or not reveal the profound influence of the image in our time. However, in Cushman’s eyes the Black male body is not being rescued, instead it stands on a self-made pedestal, not arrogantly announcing its existence but coolly (its signature) singing its own praisesong as swathes of light and behind the camera love washes over it. In each moment a small but significant revelation is made. Each revelation offers us the opportunity of an Epiphany – to think a thought about a Black man that we have not thought before. Professor Rinaldo Walcott is a cultural critic and Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto. He lives and writes in Toronto.

FIERCE! Being Black, Being Gay in America

"What Chris has done with this important collection of images, Fierce: Being Black, Being Gay in America, A Photographic Essay, is to seek, lift, and affirm the identity and visibility of men-who love-men and express it in many ways. His photographs display Midwest American men from the outlandish and flamboyant, to the subdued and subtle. You’d think these were “ladies who lunch;” muscular men dressed for the “Park” in lace, and floppy hats to give effect for all to see. Brothers connecting in places we know are safe, such as our nightclubs, the discos, and special events targeting our interests.

The importance of Fierce is paramount: all men are created equal, and share a space on earth. These portraits of men have to be recognized as God’s beauty and not His damnation. Time will thank those who were strong and dared enough to express themselves for all to see and appreciate in a manner that’s loving and creative. Time will also thank us for not living in a paranoid state of mind, and afraid of our own shadows. Remember, this cluster of work isn’t Robert Mappelthope’s approach to black imagery, but the approach of documenting men as they wanted to be seen: with and without sexual stimulation, for shock value."

Curtis A. Lipscomb
Executive Director Kick – The Agency for L-G-B-T African-Americans
Detroit Michigan / 2005
www.e-kick.com