Tower of the Sacred and Ordinary - Online Exhibition Event

Thursday, August 26

3:45-5:00 PM ET

Tower of the Sacred and Ordinary – Online Exhibition Event

with Daniel Toretsky and Evelyn Tauben

**presented as part of the #KlezKanada26 Plenary Sessions**

ABOUT THIS EVENT

A celebration for a new multimedia exhibition by Daniel Toretsky, created for Toronto’s FENSTER window gallery and presented as part of the in-person 2021 KlezKanada programming. Toretsky brings his architectural training to his artistic projects, creating imaginative built environments and urban landscapes that marry social justice issues and actual places with witty, invented scenarios and settings. Raised in the Yiddish revival scene, Toretsky’s work is often informed by probing Ashkenazi traditions, heritage and history with a humourous spatial lens. In this visually-driven session in conversation with curator Evelyn Tauben, he will share examples of his past work and the inspiration behind his multifaceted exhibition. Uncover his research process and wildly imaginative preparatory drawings together with appearances from other creatives sharing their crowdsourced contributions that inspired Toretsky’s whimsical drawings at the heart of his Tower of The Sacred and Ordinary.

**This plenary session is offered FREE and open to the public! Registration is still required.**

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Tower of the Sacred and Ordinary

Now on view 24/7 at FENTSTER through September 2021

New York-based artist and architect Daniel Toretsky invents a part-performance, part-ritual, part-sculpture for an imagined distant Jewish future in a dystopian North America. For FENTSTER, Toretsky designed a tower on wheels inspired by ornate havdalah spice boxes fashioned like medieval castles. The project’s backstory is informed by an undercurrent in the collective Jewish consciousness of romanticizing places from the past. A yearning persists to return, for example, to the mythologized pre-war Eastern European shtetl, the Moroccan mellah neighbourhoods of the 1800s, early 20th century in New York’s Lower East Side, Toronto’s Kensington Market in the 1930s, Montreal’s The Main in the post-war years or 16th century Safed. Toretsky asked a diverse group of North American Jewish artists, including many KlezKanada regulars, how our current communities might be memorialized by future generations. He wove together their responses and translated them into whimsical three-dimensional drawings filling the mobile structure designed for a speculative future where Jews resume wandering due to economic and climate collapse that renders our cities unlivable. Toretsky conceives of our descendants climbing into a life-sized version of the tower each Saturday evening for a raucous performance of our present-day Jewish lives, re-enacting moments from the sacred to the ordinary.

This exhibition is on view 24/7 at FENTSTER located in the storefront window of Makom: Creative Downtown Judaism, 402 College Street, Toronto. The work can be seen day or night from the safety of the sidewalk. Visitors are requested to maintain physical distancing precautions and public health recommendations at all times.

Details at www.fentster.org

Presented together by KlezKanada and FENTSTER

More information: klezkanada.org