Stephen Weir articles, editorials and popular social media weir postings

Art Bites:  Happy Birthday Bob! One Love Wishes From The 6Ix.  Saturday was Bob Marley Day in the city of Toronto. For the 30th year in a row, the city has issued an official proclamation in honour of Jamaica’s reggae icon. Marley, who was born on February 6th, 1945 died in 1981, is honoured around the globe on the 6th for his music and his legacy of promoting peace.  “ Bob Marley always tried to use his influence to help tear down the walls of apartheid and promote unity,” said John Tory, the mayor of Toronto, as he read the city proclamation on camera ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQwcfgBR_IU&feature=youtu.be ). “Today his music continues to inspire and uplift people throughout the world.” Every year the Bob Marley Day Committee holds a ceremony in Toronto to mark February 6th.  During the ceremony the committee, headed up by Toronto lawyer Courtney Betty, always recognize individuals for their contribution in “building our City and our country.” In 2021,...

A World Stopping Nuit Blanc Installation by Director X By Stephen Weir: Spoiler Alert! Everyone dies, including the Sun, in Director X’s new art installation Life of the Earth and Death of the Sun.  On Saturday night and early Sunday morning, as part of the Nuit Blanche festival, the Ontario Science Centre stayed open to show-off Director X’s latest creation. Set in a large open space inside a lower level   gallery a huge white balloon hangs from the ceiling.   Using large-scale projectors, the orb becomes first a rotating and aging planet Earth and then it is our Sun evolving and eventually dying. Both the Earth and the Sun are shown as if seen from space moving from the past to real time and into a not so great future.   On a near by wall a huge LED display’s     charts the collapse of the sun and show pictures of life on earth from the beginning of time, to now. Throughout the night people trickled into the exhibition space, sitti...

  At City Hall – Black Knight’s Brand New Day! By Stephen Weir in today's Caribbean Camera newspape r Scarborough’s Black Knight is currently stabled in the lobby of Toronto’s City Hall.   The real-life sized statue of a young black girl riding a jet-black unicorn is the first thing visitors now see when they enter the Queen St. Building. It was commissioned for Scarborough’s first all-night Nuit Blanc festival held in September of this year. The statue is built from 80,000 individual black Lego bricks. Named Cavalier Noir   (the Black Knight), it is meant to answer the question, “ If Scarborough was to commemorate its own heroes, what would the monument look like?” Created by two Scarborough stars - artist Ekow Nimako and video maker Director X – they say the Lego statue “ stands as an emblem of hope for the disenfranchised by drawing on hip-hop’s creative strategies: taking existing, discarded, often overlooked elements and flipping them to inspire and ampl...