Black American visual artist Heather Hart’s series of rooftop oracles based on the four directions (East, West, North, and South) is an-ongoing series of work that offers prophetic predictions for imagining new futures. Most recently, she’s created Northern Oracle, an exhibition curated by Ann MacDonald and presented in partnership with the Africville Heritage Trust at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Hart created a rooftop installation “Northern Oracle” which consists of a massive wooden top of a house that spans the entire gallery, and is accompanied by several mixed media drawings. Her work provides a powerful example of what bell hooks argues in her essay “Postmodern Blackness,” about the need to continually interrogate how “racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived as either opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking” (hooks 2318).

Paradoxically, Hart’s work is all about abstract thinking. Her art invites viewers to reconsider lost and hidden Black histories, to probe how race shapes access to ownership, and to explore physical spaces and the perspectives they offer from a wide variety of vantage points. Hart’s abstract work opens up possibilities and in particular, acknowledges the effects of colonization and dominion in relationship to Africville. Northern Oracle examines the significance of people having a place to call home, and how this relates to Africville, an African-Canadian settlement, forcibly located outside of Halifax which was first populated by Blacks in the mid-18^th century, and ultimately systematically demolished in the 1960s because of white Haligonian’s racist ideals. Haligonians deemed the community unfit and wanted to redevelop the land for industry; in turn, Africaville was razed to make way for new buildings.

For hooks, the work of Black artists and writers continue to be understood through “narrow” and “constricting notions of blackness” (hooks 2322). Hart can be read as engaging with hooks’ theory by reconsidering the history of Africville through architecture and art. Hart recreates a rooftop, or a home in the form of an oracle for Black community members to return to, building a site in which they can climb on top of the roof and in doing so, literally and metaphorically, reposition their social status as marginalized Black folks. Hart pointedly invites visitors to access Northern Oracle, by climbing onto the rooftop and ducking under the floor-level attic. Northern Oracle includes various vantage points where viewers can reflect on and potentially reconceptualize (if only momentarily) their ingrained ideas about Black power and influence—or its lack. She even encourages those who climb the installation to “shout from rooftop,” providing a place of performative liberation for Black viewers.

Inside the attic – which holds literary importance as a place Black slaves used to hide from slave-catcher and watch their masters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin – viewers can look through a peephole to see several texts about the Africville settlement on display including Jon Tattrie’s The Hermit of Africville, Shauntay Grant’s Africville, among Dorothy Perkyn’s The Last Days of Africville, amongst others. Notably, the words of the authors on display include those of Jon Tattrie who is a white male journalist, a seemingly contradictory voice to include in this kind of an exhibit.  

But perhaps the artist wants viewers like myself (a queer Qualipu Mi’kmaq woman) to explore what hooks describes as a suspicion towards a “postmodern critique of the ‘subject’ when they surface at the historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time” (hooks 2322). Next to the peephole, which provides access to various texts, Hart has placed a dream-like drawing, and sign that reads: “The artist invites you to press gold into the drawing in exchange for a wish.”  If the concept of an oracle, which predicts the future, is central to Hart’s installation, the inclusion of Tattrie’s text and the framing materials Hart employs could be understood as linking Hart as an artist to the underclass poor Black communities whom Tattrie writes about but also providing the opportunity to alter that future by making a wish and foreseeing a different set of potential outcomes for the Black community in Halifax. Hart’s postmodern art creates a space where Black communities can come to bond, re-centre, and reimagine power structures through critical and cultural exchange. Her installation challenges the idea of “the primitive,” and “authentic,” (hooks 2323) by unpacking the racial hierarchies that have shaped Black lives in Canada and offering spaces to perform alternate possibilities.

In Hart’s mixed media drawing, “Oracular Rooftop (Auntie Entity) 2016,” watercolours are combined with denim to create a collage on paper. This drawing includes a gold painted box with gold leaf; viewers are encouraged to add their own piece of gold leaf onto the drawing in exchange for a wish. This request by Hart actively encourages viewers to reflect on and engage with their own individual power and agency, prompting much like hooks a “critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics” but may not be recognized as doing so. The artist has created a space for critical exchange through art, and uses the oracle as a means to make a meeting place where “new and radical happenings,” (hooks 2325) can and are taking place. The opportunity for audience participation and offering of a wish is the radical shift in Hart’s work and a powerful example of hooks’ essay in action.

In fall of 2019, multidisciplinary artist Abbas Akhavan hung two ten-foot wide theatre curtains from a twelve-foot scaffolding on the beach in the small community of Joe Batt’s Arm on Newfoundland’s Fogo Island. The wind animated the velvet curtains, choreographing a dance between the undulating fabric and the waves in front of them, transforming the land behind flapping curtains into a stage. Every night and every morning for the duration of the installation, Akhavan climbed the scaffolding to furl and unfurl the twenty-foot wide curtains, a task that was often made more difficult by wild wind and rain, which added weight to the thick fabric. The structure was part of his site-specific exhibition and installation script for an island, which explored the overlap between the language and materials that facilitate labour and faith practices on Fogo Island and the vernacular and architecture of theatre.

I spoke to Akhavan in his Montreal studio, where he explained that script for an island, an exhibition co-curated by Alexandra McIntosh and Nicolaus Schafhausen at the Fogo Island Gallery (presented by Fogo Island Arts), was created during his third Fogo Island Arts’ residency as a response to things he had observed about the landscape and life on Fogo over the course of his culminated six months on the isolated island.

As a visiting artist making site-specific work on Fogo, it was important to Akhavan that he assume the role of neither a tourist nor an expert but something in between. He wanted to make work that was of the place but did not attempt to arrogantly reflect the islanders’ home and culture back at them. The show is a meditation on what Akhavan learned about Fogo through osmosis, through observation and casual chats over a glass of beer.

“I never went to someone’s door and asked them questions, I’m not interested in being a voyeur or extracting information, I think it’s important to just take what you’re given,” Akhavan says. “When I go to a place, I listen, I loiter, I research until I start to see a snag in the social fabric and I get hooked on something, I get stuck on it and I want to tease it out.”

During his time on the island, Akhavan noticed that much of the language and architecture used in the fishing industry on the island is also present in theatre. For example, in Newfoundland the small sheds on stilts where fish are cleaned are called stages. Stages often have a trap-door in the floor that allows people cleaning fish to let the guts fall into the ocean; Akhavan pointed out that this mechanism is similar to the pit-traps found in many theatre stages. He realized that the technology of sandbags and ropes used to operate theatre curtains are also used in sailing. He noted similar overlaps between the expression of religion on the island and the conventions of the theatre; citing the use of scripts, curtains, enactments and reveals.

When he first visited the gallery, Akhavan was struck by the fact that the large rectangular room resembled both a theatre and a church. The gallery’s ceiling is low in the back of the room where an audience’s chairs or church pews might be arranged and opens up in the back of the room, just as the ceiling above a theatre stage or church pulpit would. The gallery was lit by a small window on the second floor which Akhavan noted might have housed a lighting technician if the space were a theatre. In script for an island, he filled the window with stained glass overlay designed to look like a piece of pressboard. Light poured through collaged together slices of curved yellow, orange and brown glass. The stained-glass overlay drew attention to the strange light booth-like space, referencing a theatre as well as the stained-glass windows of churches and practical, economic method of covering a broken window that one might see in Fogo.

“Some of the visual or vernacular or aesthetic qualities of the work is very much reminiscent of what you would see on Fogo but kind of thinned out, or stretched or altered in a way to tweak it’s relationship, it’s not mimetic but it’s loyal, it’s invested,” he says, “…I’m not trying to re-represent Fogo to Fogo.”

In the gallery a slow but steady flow of water poured from the hose, collecting on a long door skin platform and eventually falling into a shallow pool on the floor. The water is reminiscent of the continuous circulation of water Akhavan noticed in fish plants in the area, however it is also a reference to how colonialism has shaped life on the island.

Akhavan has explored gardens as a method of colonial control over both nature and people in his past works. He explained that in script for an island the garden hose can also be read as the slithering snake in the garden of eden, implying that narratives about Fogo often falsely represent the pre-contact island as an edenic, uninhabited space – erasing the histories of Indigenous peoples who inhabited the island. While also referencing the important role that religion played in forming settler communities on the island. Akhavan piped the sound of a flag jangling against a pole into the gallery, as a reminder that the ongoing effects of colonialism continue to resonate throughout modern Fogo.

One week before Akhavan disassembled the installation on the beach, the gallery portion of script for an island opened. The staggered timing of the openings helped create the purgatorial feeling that permeated script for an island. The sculpture on the beach gave viewers the feeling that they were looking at the remnants of a performance that had already happened or a space that was being prepared for a future performance.

Similarly, in the gallery every twenty minutes the garden hose mounted to the wall would uncoil and recoil creating the sensation that something was either finishing or beginning. The in-between-time atmosphere of the show contributed to the reflective feeling of the work. Script for an island invites viewers to contemplate the correlations between the vernacular and architecture of theatre and of work and faith on Fogo but it refuses to ascribe an easily definable meaning to these parallels.

“My interest is in highlighting these correlations between fishing and boat building and theatre and religion, they seem to necessitate each other’s ecology in some way,” he says. “They give way to a particular kind of aesthetic and this utilitarian way of living and making and believing.”

Ten years ago, Atlantic Canada looked a lot different than it does today. Not the nature, which has remained relatively consistent, but the typical cityscape.

In Halifax, for example, heritage mainstays like the City Hall building (opened in 1830) and the Old Town Clock (opened in 1803) now coexist with modern buildings like the Halifax Central Library, which was designed by local firm Fowler Bauld & Mitchell and introduced bold lines and sleek glass walls into the city’s skyline when it opened in 2014.

Also, St. John’s, Newfoundland is well known for being a city with a long past (after all, they have close to 30 federally designated historic sites), but even they have been looking toward the future with the construction of The Rooms in 2005. The modern building was built on a historic site, but with plenty of consultation from historians and archaeologists to quell fears of lost heritage.

These places, and other cities across the Atlantic provinces, are evidence that residents have started to let go of long-held ideas that old is always better. This has resulted in new skylines that mix traditional heritage architecture with modern, innovative buildings.

This shift has been largely driven by young, creative architects who see their practice as a form of art, rather than something strictly technical and functional. They work at small firms where they have creative autonomy, bringing in inspiration from art movements, the feelings of certain places, and the stories that can be told about their work

Narrative Architecture

One of the biggest new trends in Atlantic Canada is narrative architecture, or architecture that’s developed around a story. The emphasis is placed on the meaning of the building rather than just the design.

For Monica Adair, founder and partner at Acre Architects in Saint John, New Brunswick, the narrative behind the pieces is one of the most important elements. In fact, the firm’s tagline is “storied architecture.”
“I think this idea of inspiring people to live great stories was really about going beyond the bricks and mortar,” Adair said. “It was about how we see the world, how we see ourselves in the world, and how can we transform that?”

Adair is originally from Saint John but spent a lot of her time in New York before returning home to set up her practice with Stephen Kopp, her husband and business partner.

While in New York, they set up the precursor to Acre Architects – the Acre Collective, comprised of artists, writers, landscape architects, and other people that inspired the two. There wasn’t much strictness to it – it was more about working on exciting projects with people who inspired them.

One of their first “stories,” as they call their architectural projects, was a public art piece titled “In Transit.” Situated just in front of the new Saint John Transit headquarters, the project is both a public art piece and a bus stop.

“That project for us showed that architecture could cross both realms of art and architecture, and it actually crossed the idea of functional space,” Adair said. “So, that was a really good project for us to keep our practice open and for us to work with ideas and to change the public realm.”

Another firm that’s using narrative to guide their design process is Fathom Studio in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Chris Crawford, director of architecture and vice president, says that “it’s all about storytelling.”

“I think that plays a major role in our design, and I think every project has a story, and having a team that regularly uses that as a medium, it really helps inform that greater design process.”

Fathom Studio has done a lot of work for Parks Canada, and where it would be easy to stick up a sign without any context, they focus heavily on the history of the space, telling stories that are instrumental to understanding the area and its people. There’s a reason that an area is designated a national park, and it’s not just the beauty.

For example, in Fathom’s work at Prince Edward Island National Park, they used the stories of Indigenous heritage—as well as French, Acadian and British colonization—to inform the design of their work at Robinsons Island.

The island, which is actually more of a peninsula, was most recently used for camping, but has been used by the Mi’kmaq people to harvest shellfish and by the English and Acadian settlers to forage cranberries. When Parks Canada got in touch about creating signage for their new trail system, Fathom did some research to uncover those stories and then let those stories inform their design.

The site has signs that expand and retract, minimizing the impact on the natural landscape, and transparent signs that overlay the vista with illustrations of former activities that took place on the site. At one stop, they’ve demonstrated the size of the annual cranberry harvest through a red metal frame.

“It’s just illustrating the importance of the other layers that are other times ignored in the history of what has happened on the site or the current culture and society.

Heritage reimagined

Architecture is vast and explores many complex ideas, but individual architects vary widely in their approach. The people I spoke to approach projects very differently, but one thing that they can all agree on is that there has been a major shift concerning heritage buildings, or the idea that old is good and new is bad.

“I’ve been working for 13 to 14 years now, and in that time, I’ve seen a massive shift,” said Crawford. “From being a young graduate and not having much optimism that our province or our culture would be open to new ideas to seeing a real design culture emerge.”

Crawford says that in Halifax specifically there was a perception that architectural innovation meant a throwing away of history in favour of something cold and heartless. That’s no longer the case.

Rayleen Hill, the principal architect and founder of RHAD Architects, is also based in Halifax. She’s noticed the same kind of pattern over the years and thinks the shift in perception might have been the construction of the new Halifax Central Library, a large modern glass building with a second story that juts out over the rest of the building, all bold lines and sharp edges.

“I think it was the first time that everybody got to see modern architecture in a great new light, and all that it can provide,” she said, “and I think it might have changed a lot of minds. It’s been a very important building for the city.”

Hill has worked on a number of projects that bring modern twists to heritage buildings. For example, one residential project in 2014 added a garage and new siding to an existing Halifax home, turning it from a regular old house into something modern and energy efficient that still paid tribute to the original structure.

The same goes for Adair. One of Acre’s first projects in Saint John was the creation of a tiny patio for a wine bar housed in a heritage building. The project was relatively simple, but Adair says that, as the first contemporary intervention on a historic structure in the city, the meaning was much deeper than you’d think.

It showed many St. John residents that you could make a modern change to a historical building in a city that prides itself on heritage without compromising the past.

“That’s something not to take for granted for us,” she said. “These moves, even small, kind of start to set the stage. So, I think that was a great opportunity for us to start our dialogue for mutual accommodation between old and new.”

Acre has since worked on many of the commercial buildings in the historical core of the city, bringing their signature look to much of Canterbury Street and Grannan Lane. Here, the cobblestone streets and brick buildings mix with modern industrial touches and old rustic lighting to evoke an image that’s hip and modern, not unlike what you’d see in the cooler areas of Brooklyn.

Architecture is Art

Another common thread linking this new wave of Atlantic architects is how they view their field. Whereas in big architectural firms the focus is on technique and functionality, everybody I spoke to believes that the most important element of architecture is the design, and how it makes people feel.

“I think outright that architecture is art,” said Hill, when I posed this question to her. “It doesn’t have a relationship with art, it just is art.”
Of course, she adds, this depends on the specific architect and how they approach a project. For Hill, whose background is firmly rooted in design, any architectural piece that her firm works on takes into consideration the same things that an artist would: colour, form, emotion.

That’s why it’s so rewarding for her to work on things like the Halifax Explosion Commemorative Markers. With that project, she was focused on how people would react to the space, what they would see, and how they would feel. As a result, what could have been just a signpost is a piece of public art with a message.

“What we were really trying to do was to develop a sense of scale, and really to have this moment where people could walk up to the markers and read them, and while they’re reading them, also be able to see their own reflection in the markers.”

For Crawford, the relationship between art and architecture is a little less obvious, but he heavily emphasizes the importance of place-making, something that requires the ideas of art and architecture as well as those of urban planning and community feedback.

One of Fathom Studio’s projects, a revitalization plan for the seaside community of Borden–Carleton on Prince Edward Island, is a perfect example of what they hope to achieve.

The plan looks at the fabrication yards right outside of the small town as an asset rather than a liability, envisioning a large park with boardwalks passing through marshes, markers explaining the location’s history, and rotating artist studios built from the concrete pillars of the yard.
He uses the Highline in New York City as an example of the kind of project that he sees this becoming.

“Someone walks through and sees the old highline, this derelict raised subway line and you know, your initial thought is this is horrible, we need to get rid of it,” he said, “and then you see what happens as a result of some community advocacy from that passionate community, and now every major city is trying to recreate it.”

The Borden–Carleton project has not yet gone through development, but Crawford is hopeful that either someone will pick it up or a community-led initiative will give it the support it needs to go forward. If that happens, he sees it as a hub for PEI’s artistic community.

For Adair, the relationship between art and architecture is more characterized as a way of thinking or a way of viewing the world. It has been heavily inspired by the artists she worked with in New York, including Lawrence Weiner, Walter De Maria, and James Turrell.

“I’m very interested in transformational projects, and things that change the way we think, the way we see the world,” she said. “And so I think these land artists, or these Dia Foundation artists, are just part of these big thinkers, and I think they’ve always really inspired me.”

When it comes to transformation, Acre is really pushing toward the future. By the year 2030, they hope to have completed 100 transformational projects—whether the scope be big or small—and they are well on their way to achieving that.

“We’re not just going to sit there and go, ‘okay, that’s a great project and brings in money, and we’re happy to just do it’, [the point is] to really just spend some time thinking about how do we ambitiously try to go after making change.”

Installation view of Séripop’s “The Face Stayed East , the Mouth Went West” at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.
Photo : Yannick Desranleau

Though some mark 50th anniversaries with gold, Séripop’s The Face Stayed East, the Mouth Went West marks the 50th anniversary of Charlottetown’s Confederation Centre by opening with more striking elements.

Interested in exploring entropy in bright colours and on a grand scale, Séripop—who are Montreal-based duo Chloe Lum and Yannick Desranleau—inject a measure of disorder into the glassed-in exhibition room that serves as a subterranean entrance to the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.

While I was visiting, another gallery visitor asked, “Can I walk through this?” It’s a fair question, as the installation appears at first blush as a tangled and unfurling construction zone made up of a giddy and gaudy palette reflecting pop and mod aesthetics that appropriately recall 1964, the Centre’s inaugural year. A cartoonishly oversized and bent styrofoam dumbbell greets new arrivals, sitting in front of swathes of Tyvek, rope, and vinyl tarpaulin draped over scaffolding stretching nearly the full length of the gallery room.

Installation view of Séripop’s “The Face Stayed East , the Mouth Went West” at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.
Photo : Yannick Desranleau

Three lightboxes propped up by beanbag chairs—one hot pink and protruding tongue-like from under the lightbox’s weight—display overlaid theatrical scenes in which the players are packages of wrapped materials falling into place in a Photoshop-reimagined version of the Centre’s gallery rooms. The extension cords that power the lightboxes—intentionally bright orange—hang loose as further interventions into the pedestrian traffic lanes.

“You’re not entering a room full of artworks, you’re entering the artwork itself,” Confederation Centre Art Gallery curator Pan Wendt comments on The Face Stayed East, the Mouth Went West and installation art more generally. “And this building didn’t anticipate it.”

Séripop’s installation reacts in large part to the artists’ impression of the Centre, and Wendt suggests that the difficulty of navigating the installation plays on the difficulty of finding one’s way around the Centre itself.

Desranleau and Lum conducted in-depth research about the
building in Montreal at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, whose archives house the storied history of the Confederation Centre’s genesis from its designers’ initial modernist hope for a Brutalist building that was “complete unto itself,” says Wendt, to a lawsuit that developed with an allegedly incompetent construction company, eventually resulting in the architecture firm pulling out of the project completely. The building’s use has veered from its architect’s original vision of concrete perfection to one that has come to include gardens and marble, among many other unforeseen features. Séripop comment on the building’s history with an installation that parallels the pop-influenced installation aesthetics of artists like Jessica Stockholder and Davis Rhodes.

Desranleau explains the duo work with “flexible, friable” materials, using “actions like scattering, instability, and weathering.” He says, “Usually, the more flexible the
material we play with, the harder it will be to plan its reactions, whatever the conditions are.”

Lum and Desranleau are formerly of the avant-garde noiserock band AIDS Wolf, and earned their stripes plastering Montreal in show posters in the face of anti-postering bylaws, eventually expanding to larger outdoor installations. Desranleau says, “Our departure as installation artists came from what we felt was a critique of institutional control of that space, although in a very oblique way.”

Séripop’s Confederation Centre installation playfully critiques the surprising amount of change that has gone on within the Centre’s bulky fortress-like walls.

“Our installation in the entrance gallery wants to evoke this notion of history that gets recorded within the materials, and is meant to be a reference to the evolution of the material aspect of the centre itself,” says Desranleau. “By putting these objects in action,
documenting them, and then re-configuring them again within the installation, we were re-enacting a similar narrative to the one the material of the building has lived in the past 50 years.”

Despite some imperfections now showing in its concrete, one hopes the Confederation Centre’s level of entropy will stay well on the safer side of chaos in its next 50 years. But in a Centre whose theatre mainstay ends on the hopeful line “Anne of Green Gables, never change,” Séripop’s work is a timely reminder to Prince Edward Islanders that things are always in a state of flux and change is the only constant.