Rendering of Alfred Engerer’s outdoor installation entitled Invisible Streams: As Above, So Below (2012), a work in neon that will be featured in this September 29th’s Nuit Blanche in Toronto.
Nuit Blanche, or “White Night,” an art world all-nighter that takes place in cities around the world, will return for the seventh time to Toronto, Canada on September 29th. Among the dozen or so public art installations will be a work in glass by Alfred Engerer, the result of a collaborative effort of Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery curator Christian Bernard Singer and the Kitchener and Waterloo Community Foundation.
“White Night” celebrations began over one hundred years ago in St. Petersburg, Russia, where the patterns of the summer solstice in the northern latitude made it as though the sun never set. The event has spread to 120 cities across the globe, including Berlin and Paris, and recently made a transatlantic splash in New York and Toronto. Toronto’s devotion to commemorating the night has only seemed to grow with more than 150 awaited projects for visitors to admire.
Among these selected installations is “Invisible Streams: As Above, So Below”, a piece created by native Toronto glass artist Alfred Engerer from the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery. The piece aligns fittingly with both the celestial theme of the festival as well as its emphasis on Toronto’s history and structural layout. A suspended maze of hand-blown neon tubes, letters and logos, the installation can be viewed by visitors in the trees at First Canadian Place. Each illuminated fragment is thoughtfully entangled to signify the city’s three different “streams”: stream of air, of water, and of consciousness. Engerer was inspired by the supreme influence these concepts have over routine life in the city, from the formation of clouds to the shape of our own sentences and fragments of thought.
Artist Alfred Engerer (far left) at work in the studio.
Engerer is a prominent figure in the Canadian glass art world. His work has been featured in over 150 exhibits and his work is inspired by architectural form, both natural and man-made, physical or intangible. Most recently, his pieces have been featured in Canadian
Clay and Glass Gallery’s exhibit “Casting & Blowing & Slumping, Oh My!,” which ran during the summer of 2010.
—Madeline Harrington