Two thousand and six: It was the year Facebook opened its platform to the world; the era when peak tabloid culture christened Britney, Paris and Lindsay sharing a cab “the bimbo summit” and the year Pluto was downgraded from a full-sized planet to a dwarf planet.
In Halifax, it was also the year that the artist-run centre Eyelevel buried a time capsule as part of an art exhibit.
The buried treasure was almost completely forgotten about, lost to time—until Wren Tian, one of Eyelevel’s co-directors, happened upon an old exhibit poster mentioning the time capsule, and its open-by date of 2024. “When thinking about the 50th anniversary, I’ve spent so much time trying to think ahead that it’s kind of fun to be like: ‘okay, slow down and look back.’ And that day that the poster was found, we were looking through all of these ephemeral duplicates that our archive gave back to us,” Tian says. “It’s really cool to go through all of those, and see all the things that Eyelevel’s done in the past and how it’s kind of shifted away from some things into other things and all the cool programming that has happened. It was kind of nice and inspiring.”
The obvious next step was to take to Instagram, asking who knew more about the project—and where it might be buried.”I think the funny thing will be folks had submitted any kind of like digital media: Will there be a floppy disk, then we’re gonna have to figure out how to play that,” adds Tian.
One of the original organizers messaged Tian about the project through IG (a sentence that’d sound so space-age in 2006, before the photo and video sharing platform existed). So, will they spill the capsule’s location? The city’s changed so much in the intervening years that it feels entirely possible it’s trapped under a condo, I tell Tian. “That will be so sad. We just have a funeral for it: Like, we’d all gather at the condo and be like…” they trail off, mounting an expression of despair to suit the hypothetical.
I try to waggle more info of the capsule’s location, but Tian is tight-lipped. Only after several goes round will they even confirm a neighborhood: “It’s not in the north end,” offers Eyelevel’s other co-director, Sally Wolchyn-Raab with a laugh. “It’s somewhere for sure,” Tian says, effusing evasiveness. “It’s safe and sound: 18 years of being hidden, I guess.”
The time capsule’s contents are mostly unknown even to Tian (though they mention the poster talks about printed matter): All part of the mystery that’ll be revealed next year, which also happens to be Eyelevel’s 50th anniversary (which played a role in Tian’s original interest in recovering the capsule—other than the quirky-fun factor). Full plans for the unveiling are still being hammered out, Tian adds.
I ask Tian and Wolchyn-Raab how Eyelevel’s changed over almost five decades. Multiple location shifts and the decision to be a pop-up gallery has made it more “ephemeral”, Wolchyn-Raab offers. Adds Tian: “ We haven’t become really corporate, that’s for sure. We’re very much still run by artists for artists.“
Eyelevel officially turns 50 in June 2024, but celebrations are slated to take place all through next year.
This article appears in Feb 1-28, 2023.
