It had all the makings of a great Hollywood romance comedy, or Sex and the City, the movie.

Fittingly, the groom was late and the bride was pacing back and forth clasping her cell phone trying to reach her fiancée.  There were whispers amongst the guests that the groom had been struck with a paralyzing case of cold feet. Was he going to leave her stranded at the alter?

But he finally showed, and Laura Simon would have her first of what she says is going to be at least eight weddings.

In fact, the guests were asked to donate $5 for the already-planned annulment.

This is Simon’s final art project for specialized studio practices, a fourth-year fine art class at the University of Guelph. Call it performance art, or don’t call it art at all; it really doesn’t matter to Simon. For her, the project is more of a political statement about the socially constructed and paradoxical nature of marriage. Simply put: Simon is trying to show just how easy it is to get married, annulled and married again, bringing it all together in a public forum.

“There is this thing that happens whenever marriage gets challenged, when divorce first came up, or when gay marriage was proposed,” said Simon, a day before her wedding. “People defend it as a natural institution that you can’t change, that it has a natural identity. I’m trying to point out that it is a legal institution, a social institution, and we can change it and it’s easy to do that.”

Her intention is to get people talking about marriage. She draws inspiration from a Toronto artist named Darren O’Donnell who talks about a process called ‘beautiful civic engagement’ where art is viewed as something aesthetic, but is in a form that engages the community in a meaningful way.

Simon’s project is simple to describe, but hard to execute.  She isn’t simply putting on a performance or mock weddings; Simon plans on going to city hall today and become legally married to her fiancée Trevor, her second year roommate. Simon is quick to stress that all her marriages will be platonic. On Tuesday night she had a ceremony at the Albion Hotel where guests contributed money to the annulment she plans on getting either tomorrow or sometime Saturday. She will then have a “divorce party slash engagement party” with her next fiancée.

While the main commentary of the project is on the social construction of marriage, Simon’s own license in the process has it’s own political meaning.

“I have the freedom to get married a bunch of times but that’s only something recent that women have been able to do,” she said. “There is still a struggle for same sex couples and for people coming in from other countries. If they are having problems with their status or their citizenship, it’s really hard to get married. I can do this because of my position.”

What is most fascinating about Simon’s project is that a political statement is juxtaposed with Simon relishing in the traditional aspects of creating a wedding.

“I’m coming from the perspective of someone who doesn’t want to be married but who had been raised looking forward to marriage, especially being a girl,” she said. “But resisting marriage has nothing to do with the cultural upbringing or the pageantry of it. It makes you feel kind of unsatisfied. I’m getting the satisfaction in my want for wedding pageantry while making an active resistance to it, instead of being inactive.”

And, for the most part, the preparation for the ceremony and the ceremony itself was like any other wedding. Simon had to rent the space, decorate it, assemble guests (albeit in her own unique way, through posters and a Facebook group) and get help from friends. The excitement amongst guests was, well, the excitement you would see at any other wedding. Some guests were dressed in formal attire, the bride herself wearing a strapless red dress. She had bridesmaids. The groom had his groomsman. There was a large wedding cake, be it paper mache, placed on a table near the centre of the room, fooling almost every guest who went by.  The DJs played wedding and bar mitzvah staples like Will Smith’s “Getting Jiggy wit it.”  There was no doubt that a wedding was about to take place.

But while her intention was not to mock the institution of marriage, elements of the ceremony at the Albion seemed nothing more than that. The person conducting the ceremony was wearing a black cloak with an oversized cross slung around her neck while holding a bible.  Neither was this person a registered religious figure or did the ceremony in any way resemble a traditional Christian wedding. Whether it was the intention of Simon or not, the person was an obvious caricature of a religious figure.

During the exchanging of the vows, there was lack of seriousness on the part of the wedding party, resulting in moments where the ceremony was simply incoherent. They planned to karaoke their vows but technology failed them. The groom yelled out to his friends while at the altar. The crowd heckled back.  It felt precisely like a fake ceremony, a joke more than an actual wedding.

Perhaps this was all intentional. Keep in mind, one of the most interesting ideas Simon is trying to convey is that marriage is socially constructed: it was her wedding and she created it the way she wanted.

But the fact that she was having a ceremony testified to its importance in the project. If the ceremony had been conducted with more veracity, resembling a traditional ceremony, Simon’s intended commentary on the social and legal construction of marriage would have been stronger; the viewer would have seen her playing upon a familiar aspect of the traditional institution she is trying to resist.

But at the end of the day, it is just one of many weddings, and because it is the legal act she is commenting on, it will be her ability to get married and annulled, then married and annulled again, that will ultimately make the project a success or a failure.