Nocturne: Art At Night: October 16, 2010

Nocturne: Art at Night, is a one day, completely free festival that takes place once a year in various public and private locations around Halifax. Somewhat similar to Toronto's Luminato Festival, Halifax's Nocturne aims to promote the arts community and make it more accessible to the public, by facilitating collaborations and exhibition opportunities in the form of a free, night time contemporary arts event.

This year marks the third instalment of this annual event, which runs from 6:00 PM until Midnight, and features over 100 art exhibits. Did I mention that it's all completely free?

You'd think that six hours is a long time to look at art, but since many of the exhibits were spread out around peninsular Halifax, the time simply flew by and I was not able to visit even half of the galleries/shows that I had wanted to see. However, that's also the genius of the Nocturne festival, since everyone has to come back the next year, and the next, just to see everything they want to see.

(My brother, EP Dan, contemplates his inability to understand the tangible form given to the contrasts and surplus of information the artist sees as the root cause of chaos, and subsequently decided to represent in this picture with a multiplicity of systems that coexist and confront one another in the same piece.)

(As I mentioned above, not all of the exhibits were indoors. Some, like this one entitled Paths No. 2: Reticulating a Warren, in Victoria Park, were outside. No, I don't know what it's supposed to represent either.)

(This is famous Atlantic Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis' actual house. She painted/decorated it herself, and it is so tiny - 10 feet x 12 feet - it actually fits into one floor of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia where it stands today. She lived in this miniature house with her husband for many decades before succumbing to rheumatoid arthritis in 1970.)

(At the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia I also participated in a "hands on" art exhibit, that called for participants to decorate a piece of cork board and then place it on a large tracing of the human brain. In my contribution, which I entitled "Some String, and a Sea Shell, and Some Other Stuff", I attempted to expertly recreate what someone who would have had no idea what they were doing, would have created had they been asked to decorate a piece of cork board and stick it on a giant tracing of the human brain.)

(This is your brain on art. Don't do art, kids. Of course I was joking there. Additionally, in case you were interested my piece eventually gets glued somewhere along the upper cerebellum.)