The headpiece rests on a bust in the window, a superhero’s costume without a secret compartment in the hideout. Facing the street, it’s perhaps being hidden in plain sight. Passersby don’t recognize the mask, which will be worn by Ursula Johnson during Nocturne, as part of the Prismatic festival. It’ll cover her head and eyes, […]
Visual Art
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Nocturne spotlight: Window Ballet
Artist and musician Lisa Lipton originally conceived of the idea of a performance art piece that would play itself out through the windows of a house four years ago, where each window would serve as one act of a play. She initially intended it as a long-term solo project, but following rejections for government funding, […]
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Nocturne spotlight: City Mail
Last May, a few handcrafted mailboxes mysteriously cropped up around north end Halifax—mounted to lampposts, nestled discreetly in bookshelves in local coffee shops and art galleries. The idea was not to replace Canada Post, but to encourage people to examine their relationship to their community and to each other through letter writing. It would be […]
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Nocturne spotlight: A Year In the Making
As I turn on my recorder, Scott Saunders leans in to ask, “So, uh…This isn’t gonna be coming across as anti-government, eh?” It’s a fair question. Saunders has been “battling,” as he puts it, with the Halifax Regional Municipality for just under a year over his desire to curate an immersive art show in the […]
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Carbon copying the Morris building
Walking by the boarded up and relocated Morris building the past few weeks, you may have noticed artists Sarah Haydon Roy and Charley Young tacking sheer white fabric onto its sides and frottaging the building’s facade; the two have been working on their Nocturne project, Carbon Copy: The Charles Morris Building. “Both Charley and I […]
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Photographing oddities
Geri Nolan’s summer Alternative Process Photography workshop at NSCAD was unconventional. “This class exemplified most of what would constitute bare-bones photography,” says photography student Veronica Horsman. “It was all about mistakes. It was all about breaking photo rules. It was all about experimentation. We were doing everything from 200-year-old processes to digital negatives. How often […]
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Painting a Declared Surplus
Steven Rhude’s painting of a candy-striped lighthouse, tipped to the right by the weight of a rope pulling at its top from the hands of an unnamed stranger is unsettling; lighthouses are a thread in the landscape fabric of the east coast, or any coast of Canada. But Steven Rhude’s new exhibition, Declared Surplus, speaks […]
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Creating the Best Movie Never
“Everything is better with Ewoks.” That’s how artist Karen van Niekerk sums up her artwork (pictured above) for Best Movie Never, an exhibition of art for the Atlantic Film Festival’s Frame X Frame that asked artists to create posters for the best movie never made. “I knew straight away I wanted to do something with […]
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Peeking Behind the Scenes
Nine local, national and international photographers answered the call for behind the scenes photography on film sets, composing ViewPoint Gallery’s current print and digital slide exhibition that coincides with the Atlantic Film Festival. Curated by Hannah Minzloff, the exhibiting artists include Holly Crooks, Jenny Blackmore, Andrew de Freitas, Etienne Desrosiers, Elias Djemil, Aaron Henderson, Christopher […]
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Walking shoes: Directed by DAMMSel
Léola LeBlanc wants people to see the sites of Dartmouth in a new way. “Basically I’m trying to create ephemeral landmarks,” says LeBlanc, who lives and works in the city. She sits in the cool air of a corridor at Alderney Landing, above the ferry terminal and out of the noon-hour sun and muggy wind. […]
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Stephen Kelly: WaveUp
Halifax artist Stephen Kelly’s kinetic sculpture and sound installation, WaveUp, isn’t necessarily about isolation and the loneliness of a remote location, though that mood pervades the experience, just below the surface of the work. Attached to mechanized and levered arms, speakers are mounted to walls and suspended from the ceiling. The arms move and the […]
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Layering on the Urban Sprawl
New Brunswick artist Jack Bishop is back at Gallery Page and Strange for his second solo show, and his paintings are just as gorgeous and haunting as the first. Bishop continues to play with the theme of consumerism, this time painting landscapes of business parks and sprawled areas that you’d likely recognize from your own […]
