Together, Apart

The Project

There are many kinds of adversity faced in life, such as illness, loss, and insecurity. It should come as no surprise then that people have had to learn how to persevere through unexpected experiences. This ability to withstand misfortune and bounce back from difficult events is a skill that takes time, strength, and help from others. It is our resilience that enables us to work through emotional pain, often cultivating a sense of empathic community amongst strangers and ourselves, sometimes together and occasionally apart. Over 14 weeks, the 2022 Nuit Blanche Fellowship team conceptualized and produced an artistic project driven by this theme of resilience. They created Together, Apart, a 15-minute immersive and interactive digital art experience that invites audiences to witness personal stories about migration, inclusion, distance, and acceptance. It demonstrates how people may choose to emerge from hardship—likely stronger than ever before. Inspired by Nuit Blanche Toronto's curatorial theme, this installation observes common human experiences through celestial visuals and dynamic audio. It examines the vitality of storytelling by using a series of interviews conducted over the summer months, exploring everyday connections people have with their kin, culture, and land. As audiences wander through the experience, they freely interact with visual projections while listening to narrative soundscapes shared in multiple languages, such as English, French, Russian, and Spanish. “Together, Apart” invites the viewer to ignore the pre-existing spatial and prejudicial boundaries that attempt to divide. Instead, it asks us to reflect upon the universality of shared human experiences, revealing that people are more similar than they are different.

The Artists

• Mason Victoria

• Ismail Ali

• Arshdeep Boparai

• Lucy Collingwood

• Antony Grice

• Ashley Meza-Wong

• Joshua Ross

• Roshane Wright

• Adam Yee-Stewart 

Humber Galleries and Nuit Blanche Toronto are pleased to partner together again on the Nuit Blanche Fellowship. Returning for its second year, a new team of eight multi-disciplinary students were selected to explore their individual artistic talents, while working together on the ideation and production of a project inspired by Nuit Blanche’s 2020-2022 curatorial theme The Space Between Us. Under the supervision and mentorship of Humber staff, over the span of 14 weeks they created Together, Apart, an immersive and interactive digital art experience.

Acknowledgements

The 2022 Nuit Blanche Fellowship team would like to thank staff from Humber College and the City of Toronto, and the many mentors they’ve met along the way. They would especially like to recognize the ongoing support of Humber Galleries.