Nocturne's building inspection

For Nocturne, people aren’t just invited to look at
art, but to look at architecture through art.

Some of this year’s artists will insert their work into vacant
spaces. Others will fill in the void left by demolition (or the memory
before massive renovation). And still others will project onto and into
buildings currently in use. In altered states, familiar Halifax
structures and sites may well attract new attention and due
consideration.

Some reject empty buildings as signs of decay. Others receive a
signal of future progress. Barrington Street, and its banks of
papered-up windows, has been a focal point for the debaters. Scott
Saunders‘ attention had returned again and again to two horizontal
bands of windows on opposite sides of the street, specifically the
former Sam the Record Man (1651 Barrington Street) and the old Dooly’s
location (1652 Barrington). Saunders is leading a team to create a
sound and video installation called Tide’s Comin’ In….

“The windows cascade down the street,” he says. “We wanted something
that’s going to create movement up and down it.”

In a sense, says Saunders, they’ll “stitch” into the buildings, via
the windows, footage shots of the surf at Cow Bay. They’ll sync up
sound, which Saunders describes as “very loud surf, swell, wind and
birds going out of four speakers arrayed up and down the street, which
should bind the whole space together.”

Consequently, he wants to transform a peripheral experience into a
focal one. “Hopefully, it cuts through the numbness or stops the
hypnotizing, hypnotic type of relationship we have as we move through
these environments [by] creating a different kind of feeling than
you’ve ever had in that particular place before, with those particular
people around you.”

Arianne Pollet-Brannen‘s work Genuine Leather occupies
window space in the Roy Building (1657 Barrington). Five women and one
man will wear the textile artist’s designs made from reconstructed
leather shoes. Leather “just makes the person feel a certain way:
powerful,” offers Pollet-Brannen. “The performers will do very simple
acts, based on how they wish to respond to the public. They’re in
charge.”

Her “mannequins with an attitude” don’t have to face onlookers if
they don’t want to. They can stand or sit, she says. “Instead of the
gazer on the outside of the window, they will have control.”

As backdrop to her figures, Pollet-Brannen will use commercial
fabric printed with a “simply elegant” polka-dot motif that Gerald
Ferguson, who died last week (see page 43), had been experimenting
with. The two artists’ studios neighbour each other in the Immigration
Annex Building.

With the built fabric of any city undergoing constant
change—blending, resolving, dissolving—it’s as if a city’s in
constant struggle with itself. Is dissolution, particularly of
heritage buildings, a natural part of this evolution? Will
often-maligned modern and post-modern architecture ever be considered
part of architectural heritage, with an equal place alongside (not
replacing) 19th century structures, as in other Canadian cities?

With Resurrection: Kelly Building (1790 Granville Street),
Charley Young and Sarah Roy offer ground for discussion.
Their installation’s centerpiece is a frottage-printed
30-by-40-foot-long piece of fabric. They’ll graft that on the site as a
“second skin of the old building.” For one night, it’ll no longer be a
“voided space,” explains Young.

The building gets another life, however temporary, complete with
doors, display windows and brick pattern reproduced in “life-sized
representation.”

“It should be pretty ghostly, pretty haunting I hope,” says Young,
who’s still working on the lighting scheme. Originally from Calgary,
Young has observed “how people come and go” from Halifax. That
transience echoed in the city’s architecture.

“After the old Trinity Church on Cogswell Street got knocked down,
it occurred to me then that the architecture of Halifax is equally as
temporary as the people.”

The Kelly Building, she points out, was a registered heritage
property, but still it got knocked down. “I really feel like it’s a
loss of history,” continues Young. “It’s heritage that’s just gone
forever.”

History is arguably always on the verge of being lost; it’s easily
ignored and forgotten, whether a building comes down or not.

For some, Dalhousie’s Faculty of Architecture and Planning (5410
Spring Garden Road) is likely just another old building in
Halifax. Of course, the goal and the hope is that a new generation of
architectural practitioners is taking shape within its walls. Architect
and professor Sarah Bonnemaison and a group of her students will
temporarily transform the school by suspending a “field of light,”
according to Bonnemaison, to follow the formal sweep of the building’s
iconic stairway.

“The whole idea and magic of this is that it will look just like a
floating carpet in a way,” says Bonnemaison.

The light will extend out toward the street, passing through the
largest window in the facade—crossing the threshold from space within
to space without, or vice versa, eradicating the division between the
two domains.

“It will give the illusion that this sort of cloud of little lights
will come right through the window,” says Bonnemaison. “It’s really
simple. Its inspiration is minimalist art or land art.”

Approximately 500 glowsticks will be used, a number deliberately
chosen to symbolize the “soul of each student.” About that number of
students attend the school each year, Bonnemaison says.

Similarly, three NSCAD classes are working, respectively, on audio,
video and translucent drawing for In Transit (Port Campus, 1107
Marginal Road). Barb Lounder‘s students started the process by
researching actual stories and testimonials of immigration to Canada,
official documents and government policy reflecting the positive and
negative decisions this country’s made in the past, at neighbouring
Pier 21. They circulated “dossiers”—information in transit—with the
rest of the students.

“They appreciate what Pier 21 does as an archive, a site of memory,”
Lounder says.

Her class will provide primarily a video and still-image component,
using media to metaphorically illustrate the challenges and
difficulties of such crossings they studied at the national immigration
museum next door.

Cliche and easy “happy endings” are being eschewed, Lounder says.
“People remember Robert Dziekanski— that the inquiry’s happening
right now—out west and that’s a story of a failed immigration.
They’re aware that there’s this other side to it or that there’s this
gloss to it: Canada welcomes immigrants. But in another way,
they’re not really wanted or that there’s not really this affinity with
them.”

The video will be projected on two porches facing the Marginal Road
side of the building. Visible from ground level, they’ll show student
bodies in various types of movement. “They’re paring down to this basic
language of movement,” Lounder says. Some students have experimented
with crawling, while others will run or block another trying to
cross.

At the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic (1675 Lower Water Street),
selections from the museum’s massive collection of 19th century ship
portraits—the biggest in Canada—will be projected onto a
south-facing brick wall of the Robertson Store Chandlery. The old
retail store’s core dates back to the 1830s, explains Dan
Conlin, the museum’s curator of marine history.

“Our ships were all over the world and painted by artists all over
the world,” explains Conlin. Artists from Hong Kong to Antwerp to New
York painted vessels from Nova Scotia.

The portraits are at the heart of a museum that exists in what many
say is the heart of Halifax—its waterfront. “I only have space to
display about three of them at a time in our public gallery. So we’ve
always wanted to exhibit more of them,” says Conlin, who’s happy to
bring the collection outdoors, as most of the paintings are hidden away
on storage racks.

He’s planning on cycling through roughly 100 of the 300 in the
collection. Though there will be “dark and stormy oils,” Conlin says,
“A large number of them are watercolours. The Mediterranean artists did
a lot of watercolour images, which I must say tend to project better
because they’re brighter.” In other words, they look good at night.

Sean Flinn is a freelance writer living in Halifax.