Julian Sleath wants to help you see the city in a new light.
The Programming Manager at the City of Toronto, Sleath is responsible for a wide cross-section of cultural programming including Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.
With the all night celebration of visual arts scheduled to begin after sunset, CP24.com recently sat down with Sleath to talk about the unique ability of the festival to break down barriers and showcase the city in a new way and why he thinks all art-goers should bring a fresh pair of socks Saturday night.
CP24: One of the unique things about Scotiabank Nuit Blanche is its ability to break down barriers, whether it is cost, location or even timing. Do you see this festival as a valuable opportunity to introduce a new audience to the visual arts?
Julian Sleath: Yeah, we hope for many people that it is sort of an introduction to contemporary visual art. It is of course free, so it is accessible from a financial basis, and we also work very closely with the artists and curators to make the work very accessible in other ways. I know a number of now teenaged boys belonging to some friends of mine who have always loved Nuit Blanche. Sure they can’t necessarily describe the artist or the title of the work, but they can describe where they saw the work and they can describe what they saw four or five years later and now they have subsequently been to art galleries of their own volition and they are even saying ‘I saw so and so or I saw that guy that did the clowns at Nuit Blanche.’ These young people are getting engaged and it carries through their lives. The trick and the opportunity for us as producers is to work much more closely with some of the institutions and find ways to bring people back into their buildings to see art in perhaps a more formal context.
CP24: This year a number of exhibitions will be left on display after sunrise in kind of a first for Nuit Blanche in Toronto? Is that something we may see more of in the future?
Julian Sleath: We are hoping. It may well be that we try to hang on to some of these iconic works and present them in a different context, but we are still going to keep to the sort of sunset to sunrise mandate for the main event itself. One of the positive aspects of the time-based thing is that many of the building owners and operators will give us access to their space, which is normally used as office foyers or bank atriums just to name a couple opportunities and we work closely with the artist to try to make work specific to the location and time. You know for some of the artists just having that 12 hour window is an enormous release. It is actually not going to be a statue on a column for 80 years or 100 years and that gives the artist a whole other form of expression.
CP24: I am glad you brought up some of the more mundane spaces transformed by Nuit Blanche. It is kind of a corny thing to say, but this festival really does transform the city itself into a work of art.
Julian Sleath: It does. Our strong mission is to make you look at those familiar places again. You have been into some of these offices, you might have come to pay a parking ticket at city hall or applied for some formal permit, but on the night of Nuit Blanche with some of the sculptures and art projects we do it can make this very familiar and iconic building look different and make it engage with the public in a different part of their brains. One of our phrases is ‘See Toronto transformed by art’ and we take great delight in that, making our audiences and making ourselves look once, twice or thrice at a familiar building and say ‘Oh, who thought they could that.’
CP24: Are there any projects you would like to sort of highlight for our audience. What is on your must-see list?
Julian Sleath: That is a tough challenge, but I think everyone has to come to city hall at some point during the evening and if you can’t make it on the night of Nuit Blanche please come back before the end of October and see Ai Weiwei’s fantastic sculpture ‘Forever Bicycles.’ In my mind it is a new iconic signature piece by an international artist. This is an epic public work and we are truly blessed that the artist has given this gift to the city.
CP24: What is your Nuit Blanche strategy? How do you sort of go about your night?
Julian Sleath: There are over 120 projects this year and I am pretty diligent in terms of making my way around to most of them. First off I have three bicycles in different locations so I can do a combination of using the streetcar and subway system and then jumping on a bike when I am going to see something in the more immediate area. Another couple of secrets of mine are to have a good pair of shoes because there can be a fair bit of walking and in the early hours a change of socks can be just fantastic.
Q and A is published every Saturday.
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