Orest Tataryn

Streetlight Sculptures
Curated by Orest Tataryn with works by by Lois Andison, Matthew Birch, Anne O'Callghan, Gordon Hicks, Thrush Holmes, Heather Nicol, Jonathan Sabine, Orest Tataryn, Christy Thompson, John Wilcox.

Overhead sculptures are exhibited fixed to city streetlight poles creating a street-long exhibition of contemporary light art.

About Orest Tataryn curator and artist for NIGHTLIGHT Streetlight Sculptures

In the life of Orest Tataryn, everything comes up fire.  For 24 years he had worked with the Toronto Fire Department, retiring at the end of 2003 as a captain.  It was during one incident in a smoky restaurant that Orest became entranced with neon and at that moment, decided that he was interested in an artistic career working with light. He set a personal mandate to transform the common commercialism of neon into something that could express beauty and artistic meaning.

From the fires of the molten glass furnaces and torches, to the neon bombarders, he brings the hand blown coloured glass tubes to a living light.  He has been influenced by the simplicity in the design of light sculpture by such pioneers in the movement as Dan Flavin, James Turrell, Michael Hayden, and Steven Antonakos, etc. The relationships between light, colour, and shadow are the constant and conscious challenges and inspiration in his work.

The studio practice is expanding in several directions, one being the incorporation of drawing and painting into color fields that express the relationship between landscape and geometry. Another approach is interactive animation to draw the audience into the currency of social commentary.

Orest Tataryn has curated a remarkable group of artist for Nuit Blanche : Bloor NIGHLIGHT Streetlight Sculpture projects inclulding:

Lois Andison
Pauline, Emerson, Jenet, Wallace & Randolph….
Lois Andison has had a studio in the area of Lansdowne and Bloor for the past 10 years. She frequently bikes and takes shortcuts through streets that bear the common names of people. Playing with semantics, Andison uses street names to weave a narrative text illuminating a rendezvous outside the House of Lancaster.

Andison is a sculptor interested in mechanical movement. She currently lives in Toronto and teaches at the University of Waterloo.

Mathew Birtch
As a furniture designer and alumni of the Sheridan Institutes school
of Craft and Design. My work combines elements of craft and mass
production, and explores both material and process. I am inspired by
the point at which the machine can no longer produce a desired result
and the skilled hand must take over.

This lamp shade is made entirely of styrene, the substrate for most
lamp shades. This application re-contextualises the substrate to be
the lamp it's self, playing with it's translucence and the shadows
that result in wrapping it around it's self. The cartoon cloud motif
works with the colouring of the styrene, and in combination with the
streams of light when there is no styrene overlap are meant to evoke
thoughts of the storm clearing. The storm clearing along with making
visible that which is usually hidden fits well with the neighborhood
that most of us avoid at night.

Anne O'Callaghan
Anne O'Callaghan is Toronto based multi-media artist, some-times-
Irish most-times Canadian. O'Callaghan, use of photographs, found
objects and three dimensional objects, in some way or another connect
to landscape, be it urban or rural.
I am very happy to have my own BLUE LAMPOST

Gordon Hicks
Light rain tonight

Most streetlamps are utilitarian, casting light and illuminating the way. But in the neighbourhood of Bloor and Margueretta stands a certain lamp that showers passers-by with raindrops. Here it serves, like rain in the night, to precipitate thoughts and feelings that might otherwise go unnoticed.
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Gordon Hicks is a former engineer, now artist, who lives on Bloor Street and has a streetlamp outside his window.

Over the past five years I have worked in a vast assortment of mediums, mined a diverse range of artistic vision, and have continuously explored different approaches to composition, seduction of audience, and frontal immediacy.  I have become particularly interested in developing an understanding of how the world works and how to manipulate my own existence by way of revisiting and reinventing my tumultuous relationship with art, finance, and the exterior world.

Complicating and disrupting the exchange between image and material, and material and audience, has been of recent interest to me.   I seek to elegantly and uniquely choreograph the layered image with textures and paints, obstructions over photographic source material, and the addition of reflective surfaces such as resin and ripped Plexiglas slats. These works, commonly monumental and cinematic in scale, are about presence and constructing a universe in which the viewer can find connectivity, reference, and resolution.

My new work balances the notions of art, commerce, vanity and biography.  I am not speaking to any broad-based economic idiom.  I am seeking to address a more localized perspective, the Canadian view of the business artist.  I have been composing large colour field and minimalist works of paint, light, and embroidery; all containing the same piece of advice, “Money is alright”.  In addition, I’ve documented myself in arranged settings on Polaroid film, then juxtaposed reproduced images of animals on clear film around my image in a complex multiplicity of textures and layers.

Heather Nicol
Heather Nicol has created several bodies of work surrounding the theme of “Night Lights” that have reappeared over many years. She is interested in the ways light against darkness can evoke notions of comfort and safety, of seduction and allure, of memories and dreams. For Nuit Blanche, she has created “Swirl”. Her work can be seen at www.heathernicol.ca

Heather Nicol is also an independent curator.  Last December she produced “Making Room” in a 30,00 square foot vacant space in the Bloor Landsdown area, featuring work by over 50 artists. She lived for over twenty years in New York City, and is delighted to call Toronto her new home.  This is her first public art project in the city.  projectwww.makingroomcuratorial.com

Jonathan Sabine
Jonathan Sabine studied cabinetmaking at BCIT before attending the Sheridan Institute where he studied furniture design and construction. While at school he won numerous awards, scholarships, and competitions. Since graduation he has participated in exhibitions with the Vest collective and has worked professionally in various capacities in the design field. He currently works as a freelance graphic, furniture, and product designer.

Christy Thompson
Drawing from aspects of surrealism and conceptual art, Christy Thompson’s practice has been based on the production of sculptural objects and installations. Specifically, she has been interested in constructing work using synthetic or pre-fabricated materials that acknowledge the everyday. Using materials such as ping-pong balls, fluorescent lighting, plastic siding and materials from the hardware store, Thompson modifies ordinary objects to distort their initial connotation and meaning. Themes of the wilderness, survival, natural structures and cellular growth are marked throughout her work but are concurrently challenged through her use of artificial materials.

As part of an ongoing series of light-objects, lamp is comprised of 60 flicker-bulbs hung at varying lengths from a pre-existing city light standard, presenting itself as a cascade of flames. Using pre-fabricated flicker-bulbs, which are designed to imitate a flame, the piece will illuminate the street below in a warm but oddly unnerving way. Lamp culls a past history of gas lamps that lined city streets as well as proposes the possibility of a terrain where something has gone wrong and where nothing is as it was.

Materials: flicker candelabra lamps, pre-existing city light standard

Christy Thompson, b. 1973, Toronto, is an artist who lives and works in Toronto. She studied visual arts at The University of Guelph and NSCAD from 1992-1997 and received her Masters of Fine Art from The University of Western Ontario in 1999. Some exhibitions that she has participated in are "House Guests" (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2001), "toggle wand"(Mercer Union, 2001) "Expect Delays" (Artspeak, 2003) and “Tokyo Wonder Site” (+Gallery, Tokyo, 2006). 

John Wilcox
John wilcox is a veteran of the glass arts scene in Toronto and has exhibited far and wide including,  The Canadian Clay And Glass Gallery in Waterloo  and  Swansea Guild Hall, Wales U.K.
John is trained as a glass painter and architectural technologist, and augments his creative endeavors with heritage glazing restoration.

For this piece john is utilizing flexible phosphorescent ceelite and lead sheet to comment on the use of poles as community tool and the current debates regarding this issue.
More of john’s work can be found at
www.vitreous.ca