Nocturne 2023 took place last weekend, my partner and I enjoyed the nice weather and wandering through the city filled with art. There were nearly 100 artists involved in Nocturne this year. We started the evening going to the Book Arts Group event on Agricola Street. The space was full when we got there, so we had to wait a second to get a place at the table. All of the people creating pages were quiet, intent on their work. Over in the corner you could print a bookmark, and people continued to pour in and ask what we were doing. All those visitors and craft supplies helped NSBAG create this amazing community art journal.
After using stamps and scraps of paper to design our page for the art journal, we continued on to the next exhibition. While walking down Agricola Street towards other Nocturne locations, we stumbled on an exhibition of the new work of Geordan Moore (@quarrelsomeyeti),
the time has come, to talk of many things. It was in the basement shop of Frabjous Delights Specialty Foods. The small space allowed the artist's bright prints to easily draw the gaze of visitors. His art mostly showed animals intertwined in struggle either with a ship, a house, or the landscape. The shop also featured free chocolate tastings. (The line was too long so we didn’t get any!) We climbed back up the stairs and walked on.
Rambler's Coffee was our next stop, for the
Stereo (for) Rough Waters X ODE (to) THE HUSTLE installation. As soon as we entered the door we could see a large projection of a film, with machinery in black and white whirring continually on the screen. Trades workers stood beside, in front, or alongside the machines pulling fresh newspapers off of the presses and checking them for errors. The next scene was of people using a smaller machine to slice a large sheet of metal. The ongoing motion of the machines matched the ongoing film which slowly flipped between shots, machines, and factories. Music, created by a collaborator of the filmmaker, complemented the rugged aesthetics of the film. The film was also accompanied by photographs lining the wall of the coffee shop. Each black and white image emphasized the human working alongside a huge machine. The film write-up discussed how the artists Nathanial Cole, Nathan DB Simmons and Dilshan collaborated to make a film backed with hip-hop tracks. The space communicated the increasing pressures of city life through hectic overwhelming images and sound.
Across the street was the
Nomnom Truck at Cuts and Paste Gallery, which was much quieter than Ramblers. The majority of the gallery was taken up by a pink 'food' truck. The food truck menu provided an artist with "ingredients" to build the visitor a collage. We chose a black background, "space," crayons, "symbols," and yearbook photos from the menu, and watched as the artist built the collage right before our eyes. It was a fun, interactive experience, and you could tell the artist, Allie (@art.angelgirl) was also enjoying their time making on-demand collages.
With our collage wrapped in classic checkered street food paper, we walked down to Seven Bays where Cadence had one of their three exhibition sites for their
Cordel Literature Treasure Hunt. The front porch of Seven Bays was covered in laundry lines with tiny colorful zines clipped all over them featuring original stories and linocuts in handmade booklets.
This project was a Nocturne-wide scavenger hunt to build a full zine. At each location there was only one chapter of each story, encouraging visitors to visit all three sites in order to collect all three chapters of their chosen zine. The windy evening was filled with the fluttering of all of the pages around us. As each guest grabbed a zine, they replaced them with a wish, leaving the cluttered space full of stories with a less dense color field of paper wishes. Each of us chose a chapter and continued to the next exhibit.
Due to the sprawling nature of Nocturne, we chose to drive to the next location. We resurfaced from the Central library's underground parking lot. We were met with haunting echoes coming from the patio behind the library. The noise came from an installantion called
Qiaqsutu. A group of large, otherworldly white statues, a mixture of draped cloth and huge masks of distorted faces or animal skulls. On the chests of the statues scenes played over and over with unnerving music. Images of water flowing and animals running. The statues towered over the crowd of viewers, making us feel a part of their world, rather than them being a part of ours. The crowd stood silently, listening to the haunting sounds, a mix between sobbing, singing, talking, animals calling, and water running.
From the information plaque, I learned the artists Jamesie Fournier, Coco Lynge, Erin Gingrich, Malayah Enooyah Maloney and Taqralik Partridge were using the sounds of Inuit voices to lament the loss of animals and land that hold immense cultural significance to the Inuit people. These haunting statues were warnings, and symbols of grief. They pleaded with the viewer to do their part to stop the loss of habitats and animal life due to climate change and the mismanagement of natural resources.
On the other side of the library were beautiful quilt stars called
Future Fragments stretched over the windows, a project by Millbrook First Nation youth. The large quilts took over the facade in a riot of color and pattern, transforming the usually hard-edged windows into soft textile shapes.
Our last stop of the night was to Inkwell Boutique's project,
I Made You a Mixed Tape. When we arrived there was a line snaking through the entire store. Everyone had gathered to try their hand at printmaking. A 100-year-old printing press was set up with a Nocturne-specific printing block featuring an old fashioned cassette. After waiting our turn, we printed the design and admired the smooth workings of the old machine.
We had to end the night there, and were unable to complete the zines we had started. Our friends who continued walking through the art exhibits said that once they got to Cadence's second location on the waterfront, all of the zines were gone. It's funny to think that I might hold the last piece to someone's zine, and we all got to take a little part of the story home, leaving behind our wishes to flutter in the night.
Written by Taryn Neufeld
