The “step and repeat” has been in a rut for ages. A staple at galas and parties in this town, like any metropolis — one that first started with Hollywood premieres and awards season red carpets and then got cannibalized by the larger social circuit in the 1990s and early 2000s — it has remained generally unchanged: a carpet (sometimes only symbolically red), a “logo wall” (a backdrop name-checking sponsors of an event) and people posing stiffly, sometimes even like lambs to the slaughter. Which is exactly what made the arrivals at an opening recently at the Bata Shoe Museum seem so very striking: remixing the “step and repeat,” the PR company DMPublic created what it calls a “tunnel walk,” leading into a super buzzy party to mark a new exhibition dubbed “Art/Wear: Sneakers x Artists.
” Cool, young celebrants captured in motion in the back of the venerable museum — in effect, turning the guests themselves into performance art. “The intersection of fashion and sneakers. And movement!” That is how Deanne Moser, the brains behind the PR shop, summed up the concept when coffeeing with me the other day at L’Espresso, near the Bata.
And just one example of what makes Moser such an indispensable part of almost anything that has to do with the art world in Toronto these days. Though she’s been at it for a while — founded her company almost a decade ago — her profile, I find, has never been bigger. Working with any number of institutions and galleri.