“As a kid, and all throughout my life in some capacity, I was always making and creating. Somewhere between being a kid and right now [there have been] a lot of life things and existential angst,” say Tian-Morris. “And somehow I ended up in art school a couple of years ago. Some may call that rock bottom—I joke!” 

Wren Tian-Morris has a witty sense of humour, which shows up in their playful, collaborative, and experimental work. With a solid focus on craftsmanship, the artist doesn’t take the work too seriously, which, in my opinion, is refreshing. For example, their most recent exhibition, Our Work, Our Pleasure,  Ourselves and Others, an undergraduate show which opened at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in March 2020 (pre-pandemic), was written in a style similar to a personal ad. 

MEET ME IN THE BEDROOM/ PAST THE BATHROOM AND A LITTLE DOWN THE HALL

Aspiring artist, curious about:

– the intersections of public, private, and pleasure;

– the way Queer (+ Trans) history (especially in the context of Halifax) has informed everything from 

Through various media such as photography, printmaking, sculpture, zine-making, and conceptual work, Tian-Morris’ show Our Work, Our Pleasure, Ourselves and Others re-imagined queer eroticism and subcultures to centre and celebrate Trans folks and People of Colour. Their attention to detail and adroitness shines through in the sharp aspects of the exhibition, which featured the zine “Fag Boy Seeks Same,” in which the artist stickered and photographed historic gay cruising sites in the city. An artist talk was also part of the exhibit, and involved the performance of boot-blacking, which is known in BDSM communities as the act of a submissive partner polishing someone’s leather boots or shoes. Rooted in the overall themes of centring trans and people of colour in queer subcultures, and kink, the various elements of the exhibition flaunted a remarkable cohesiveness. 

Tian-Morris’ ability to home in on a unifying theme, combined with their creative dexterity and their deep care for their community, are skills and commitments they brought to Eyelevel Gallery, where they recently worked as a Summer Programming Assistant. 

“I think art school has actually shown me that I don’t necessarily care for gallery shows or contemporary art. And more so that I crave community, collaborative working, playing, and not defining myself by a certain practice or medium,” says Tian-Morris. “I have to remind myself art is not this one thing, and that it can be a communal act of healing, or playing in some ways, which is why I do think collaborative working and re-framing in art is so important.” 

They cite members of their community—artists like Lux Habrich, Raven Davis, Carmel Farahbakhsh, Darcie Bernhardt, Kris Reppas, Arielle Twist, and Jean Serutoke—as influential to their own practice “[A lot of] their work often informs mine through the investigation of mediums, themes, aesthetics, etc. But beyond formal artistic elements, or simply adoring their work, I would say having conversations, spending time together, hearing them speak, and reading their writing inspires. Artists like Farahbakhsh, Habrich, and Davis, these artists (whether directly or not) help me learn and relearn what it means to be in community, to imagine new worlds, to be making art, why I’m making, and what art can be,” they say. “These artists push me to interrogate all parts of my life, which in turn, eventually informs my art. I think creating can be so many things and does not have to be confined to what we assume when we think of art, but instead can be a term full of possibilities.” 

Part of their contribution to Eyelevel was creating Co-Incidence, a publication dreamed up as a result of the Heat Waves, Eyelevel Gallery’s mini summer residency program. Tian-Morris notes that there were many incredible applications from 2SQTBIPOC applicants, but they did not have the space to accommodate everyone. They find the incredible whiteness of artist-run centres, the arts scene, and even the queer scene in Halifax to be disappointing because of the many amazing (QT)BIPOC artists who are creating brilliant work, but are often under-represented. As a response, they decided to reach out to some of the artists who applied for Heat Waves, as well as a few others for further collaboration. 

“I feel really lucky to be working with Avery Morris, Ben Mitsuk, Calen Sack, DeeDee Clayton, and Excel Garay on this Co-Incidence. All of these artists bring so much brilliance to the table. There are days when I feel angsty about art, but getting to see the work all of these artists truly brings me joy, and reminds me that creating has a place in this world and can be incredibly powerful.”

On exploring the intersections of art and magic, Tian-Morris finds art to be a way of conjuring meaning and feeling. “In the publication, Calen Sack talks about the ways that white people often inquire about Two-Spiritedness in ways that they are essentially fetishizing and fantasizing Indigenous culture. There is obviously magic in being queer and being brown but it’s not in a smoke and mirrors way. It’s something that’s felt through community and in your body. It can vary from person to person but really, at its core, it’s a feeling. It’s something you can’t explain. It’s in the ways that you know somehow your ancestors are looking out for you, or the knowing glance of being the only QPOCs in the room.”

Upon reflection of the magic in community, Tian-Morris feels that they have newly found 2SQTBIPOC community in the past year. They recall a moment when it hit them how connected they felt to their community. 

“There was this moment when it really hit me where I was so overwhelmed with joy and it felt so magical and kind of spiritual, to be honest. I’m saying this because I think talking about this kind of joy and magic is important. Right now, the art world is pretty into consuming the work of racialized queer and trans artists but only under the premise that it’s about our trauma. The artists in Co-Incidence, this publication, touch upon the ways that art and magic intersect for them and how that magic shows up,” says Tian-Morris. “There’s also a lot of talk about the intersections of culture and queerness and how that plays into this kind of magic. I really wanted this publication to just be a space for the artists. I wanted to pick their brains a bit and show off their work.” 

For Tian-Morris, Co-Incidence feels like a way of building community, “even if it’s just in little pieces.” 

From 2006 to 2009, Eyelevel Gallery hosted a studio tour called Go North! which aimed to bring arts consumers to Halifax’s North End at a time when it was largely stigmatized as a low-income neighbourhood. Artist studios, local businesses, and galleries welcomed neighbours and visitors to celebrate the North End’s alternative art-production spaces. Tour groups moved through ad-hoc backyard cinemas, sculpture gardens, and basement darkrooms, as well as projects by Uniacke Square Tenants Association, Black Business Initiative, and the Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre. Go North! attempted to work across lines of class and race difference, in order to reckon with the North End’s shifting identity.

In a 2006 article about Go North!, Michelle Strum, owner of Alter Egos Café, discusses the vacancies on Gottingen Street saying, “People talk every year about the businesses that leave, but it’s not uncommon everywhere. It’s just more obvious here because so much is empty.” ¹ The emptiness Strum describes is no longer present on Gottingen Street, where most vacant buildings are slated for demolition and dotted with scaffolding. When Eyelevel Gallery no longer had the administrative and economic capacity to continue Go North! in 2009, it foreshadowed major shifts in the North End as the pace of gentrification accelerated. Between 2011 and 2012, commercial property values increased by 17% in the North End, the highest growth rate on the peninsula. ² When the North End Business Association was founded in 2011, they claimed the domain www.gonorthhalifax.ca, making the name synonymous with economic growth and development, rather than DIY artistic action.

My guess is that if Go North! was restaged today, there would be significantly fewer artist studios on the map. Or perhaps the artist studios would simply be displaced to kitchen tables or bedrooms. Maybe these spaces never died, and only transfigured. Fuller Farm, a DIY urban farm with a bike workshop, silkscreen studio, and darkroom, has moved between different homes on Fuller Terrace; its current tenants are interdisciplinary artists who still make use of the equipment. Many ceramicists from across the North End now collectively work at Wonder’neath Art Society, using kilns that have been moved from various former studios. On the topic of artist-run culture, Jon Tupper says, “I’m interested in the sort of space that for its brief life burns brightly.”³ Temporariness is not necessarily a weakness for arts spaces, and artists find ways of embracing precarity as an inevitable aspect of their practices.

When I conducted a survey of 46 Halifax-based artists in October 2019, the number one reason they gave for leaving their North End studios was eviction/demolition. This staggering statistic comes as no surprise to artists who have been relocated in various waves of “renoviction” in the last decade. In the time since Go North!, the artist studios above Enterprise Car Rental (now Seven Bays Bouldering) and Propeller brewery were closed to make way for expanding businesses. Artist migrations tend to be patterned—after being evicted from their studios in the Bloomfield School in 2005, many artists moved to the Manual Training school before they were again forced to relocate. ⁴ The artist studios at 6050 Almon Street were demolished in 2017, and the mixed-use housing, retail, and commercial development that proposes to take its place covers almost a full city block, and will measure 27 storeys at its highest. ⁵ After losing her studio space at Bloomfield School in 2005, and again at 6050 Almon Street in 2017, sculptor Sarah Maloney says, “I finally realized that the only way I could have a secure studio space was to have it off the peninsula in a building I own.” While rising rent and financial constraints are among the top reasons why artists are vacating their studio spaces, eviction remains the dominant factor behind the relocation of artists in the North End.

In October 2019, as the Co-Chair of Eyelevel’s board of directors, I helped our Artistic Director Sally Wolchyn-Raab move boxes of receipts and archival materials into our new space above Radstorm at 2177 Gottingen Street. Eyelevel is moving less than one block away from where it was listed on the 2006 Go North! map, because its most recent home on Cornwallis Street was condemned due to damage from Hurricane Dorian. In the midst of this relocation, Eyelevel is launching Sitelines, a publication about its spaceless and site-responsive model. It developed this organizational framework under the direction of Katie Belcher in 2013, when it moved out of its space on Gottingen due to a 30% rent increase. ⁶ As it relocates for the 11th time in its 45 year history, Eyelevel continues to embrace this model, whether by choice or by force.

Eyelevel’s recent move coincides with massive changes to Halifax’s land-use policy. The Halifax Regional Municipality has been developing Centre Plan—a comprehensive policy which dictates density and height requirements for buildings in peninsular Halifax and Dartmouth—since 2015. Centre Plan’s first phase was unanimously approved on September 18, 2019, opening up several areas of the North End to high-rise developments. ⁷ The areas highlighted in red on Centre Plan’s interactive map are designated as “higher intensity zones” where mixed-use developments are authorized to be built up to 27 storeys high, the tallest currently allowed in the city. ⁸ These zones cover the current sites of Eyelevel, Radstorm, Centre for Art Tapes, Midnight Oil, Bus Stop Theatre, Halifax Pop Explosion’s office, the sites where artists were evicted from their studios at the Bloomfield School, and 6050 Almon Street. Arts spaces which fall outside of this high-intensity zone include Wonder’neath Art Society, Veith House, and Hermes Gallery, but the second phase of Centre Plan is awaiting approval.

It is widely accepted that artists contribute to the rate of gentrification in cities, and the acceleration of development in the North End is no exception. ⁹ I’ve lived in the North End on-and-off for five years, and my purchasing power as a white-settler arts worker makes me complicit in the whitewashing of my neighbourhood. When I lived on Willow Street last summer, my landlord decided to not renew our lease in order to turn our three-bedroom apartment into an Airbnb. That same summer, I cringed while booking Airbnb’s for visiting artists-in-residence, in buildings where friends and fellow artists had their leases unceremoniously not renewed. As karma’s pendulum swings, arts workers who are beneficiaries of gentrification also become its victims—sometimes simultaneously.

It is conventionally understood that arts spaces attract real estate developers to low-income areas; granted, recent research claims that “it is gentrification that draws the arts, not another way around.” ¹⁰ Peter Moskowitz, writer of How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood, argues that “there’s nearly always a stage 0, when a city opens itself up to gentrification” through tax breaks and incentive programs for developers. ¹¹ While artists are certainly involved and implicated in the process of gentrification, the policy changes at a municipal level undeniably propel drastic changes in the built environment.

As the victims of countless renovictions (in a cycle of gentrification which they, in turn, contribute to), what impact do artists have on North End property values? Are they only scuffing floors, clogging sinks, and causing buildings to deteriorate? Or are they also monitoring spaces that don’t otherwise have a security presence, creating inventive solutions to poor infrastructure, and financing the business downstairs? In my conversation with Eryn Foster, the creator of Go North!, she said, “I just think it would do so much to really acknowledge the importance of artists and the place that they occupy in our city.” As long as the points on the map continue to shift, precarity will inevitably continue to be a part of artistic practice in the North End.

1. Lis van Berkel, “Taking it to the street,” The Coast, September 7, 2006.
2. Jiajing Chen, “Streetscape Analysis of Halifax North End,” North End Business Association.
3. Jon Tupper, “Invisible Spaces,” Decentre: Concerning Artist-Run Culture = Decentre: À Propos de Centres d’artistes (Toronto: YYZBOOKS, 2008), 246.
4. Sean Flinn, “Spaced Out,” The Coast, December 29, 2005.
5. “Public Meeting Table Discussion, Case 20871,” Halifax, January 22, 2019.
6. Hilary Beaumont, “eyelevel Gallery is moving once again,” The Coast, December 5, 2013.
7. Zane Woodford, “Halifax passes first half of Centre Plan despite developers’ concerns with affordable housing ‘tax,’” The Star, September 18, 2019.
8. See the interactive map on www.centreplan.ca. See also the North End Business Association’s Development Map which tracks all new construction, and active applications for zoning variance in the North End, viewable at www.gonorthhalifax.ca/development-map.
9. Jillian Billard, “Art & Gentrification: What is ‘Artwashing’ and What Are Galleries Doing to Resist It?” Artspace, November 30, 2017.
10. Richard Florida, “Do Arts Scenes Really Lead to Gentrification?,” City Lab, March 22, 2018.
11. Peter Mokowitz, “What Role Do Artists Play in Gentrification?” Artsy, September 11, 2017.

The concept of call and response evokes a dialogue rooted in musicality, a back-and-forth predicated on sharing and reflecting back, developing, and growing a conversation. #callresponse, co-presented by Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery and Eyelevel Artist-Run Centre, is an ongoing project that developed out of Tarah Hogue’s research on Indigenous feminisms and artistic practice at grunt gallery in 2014.

In collaboration with co-conspirators Maria Hupfield and Tania Willard (their preference for “co-conspirator” or “accomplice,” a specific politicized alternative to “ally” inspired by Jaskiran Dhillon’s “On Becoming an Accomplice,” explained in the stunning exhibition catalogue), this traveling and ever-evolving collection reflects on the specifically institutionalized site of “the gallery,” a series of conversations and interactions with the physical land, its inhabitants and keepers. These conversations center Indigenous women and their practices.

Artists Christi Belcourt, Maria Hupfield, Ursula Johnson, Tania Willard, and Laakkuluk Williamson-Bathory collaborated and conspired with Isaac Murdoch, Esther Neff & IV Castellanos, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Meagan Musseau, and Tanya Tagaq to create a series of site-specific works that have continued to evolve as an ongoing project, and result in unique gallery exhibitions and across the country. Engaging with the hashtag #callresponse—perhaps the most ubiquitous symbol of a modern form of conversational structure and organization—viewers are invited to peek into a much larger and more expansive meta-dialogue.

There is a sort of starkness in the placement of the various works in the gallery, and a bareness to some of the pieces themselves. This creates an intensity and offers a complex intimacy that permeates the entire exhibition. For example, Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch’s Reconciliation with the Land and Waters, is a physical record of ceremonies the artists led at gatherings on Indigenous governance across Manitoba, Ontario and Saskatchewan in 2015 and 2016, and now exists in the gallery in absence. The robe was gifted to the artists, who are part of the Onaman collective, by the Grand Chief, and it was returned to the artists in support of their community work. 

The simplicity and deceptive familiarity of Ursula Johnson and Meagan Musseau’s collaborative audio-based endurance piece Ke’tapekiaq Ma’qimikew: The Land Sings belies the complexity and sheer breadth of the work. A map affixed to the gallery floor notes the “SMU Art Gallery, Halifax NS” as a sort of starting point for a journey charted across 13 maps tacked up along the gallery wall, which ends at “East Bay Beach, Cape Breton Island, NS.” Through a pair of headphones, the viewer is able to listen to Johnson’s “song from and for the land.”

Perhaps the most arresting pieces are Williamson-Bathory’s video-based works, which visually dominate the gallery with their size and activity, and are unflinchingly, almost confrontational, in their blend of intimacy and engagement. Timiga nunalu, sikulu (My body, the land and the ice) features the artist reclining nude upon a vast icy landscape, a classical art pose and composition which is disrupted by the artist’s use of “uaajeerneq,” a Greenlandic mask dance that plays “with elements of fear, humour, and sexuality.” The collaboration here features Inuk multidisciplinary artist Tanya Tagaq performing a contemporaneous vocalization, and in the moment a soundtrack of sorts for both the original video, and to Williamson-Bathory’s transformation into uaajeerneq, culminating in a physical performance between the women that exudes a sort of intimate kinship, and a demand to the audience to “actively experience, witness and remember.”

Maria Hupfield’s “call” to conversation is demonstrated simply by Bag, an industrial felt replication of Anishinaabe floral beadwork designs that the artist carried throughout a number of her performances. Post-Performance / Conversation Action is Hupfield’s adaptation of the highly institutionalized artist talk into a form of intergenerational community building, centering Indigenous women.

Feet On the Ground, the participatory group performance response developed with IV Castellanos and Esther Neff, challenges the viewer to examine their role in decolonization, explicitly asking “do you want to surrender or take action?” In the gallery, the physical evidence of this active collaboration (surveyor’s tape, tiny foam tools, stark black banners) lays on the floor, and the silence of the objects highlights the dynamic human component necessary to enact.

Tania Willard’s Only Available Light is perhaps most explicit in its confrontation of the manipulation and exploitation of Indigeneity by settler colonialism, something it achieves with brilliant simplicity. By placing selenite crystals in front of a projector, the silent 1928 film The Shuswap Indians of British Columbia, originally commissioned by the National Museum of Canada, Willard disrupts the transmission of the images and forces the audience to reconsider what they’re viewing. This disruption is underscored by Leela Gilday’s sound composition, and the placement of these crystals with a birch bark basket “rescued” from an antique store, and glass Listerine bottles salvaged from Willard’s reserve. The bottles are filled with seed beads and digital prints of the selenite windows of a Roman cathedral, and illustrate children on their way to residential school.

#callresponse cannot simply be understood as a response to reconciliation or a catalogue of resistance. Rather, it is an ongoing project of engagement that rejects marginalization in favour of an exploration and prizing of Indigenous women artists, and the impact of their work.

As Hogue explains, “We wanted to represent the fullness, the critical, vital abundance of Indigenous women’s artistic practices, who are leading conversations and actions for the future. It’s also important to say, however; that the invitations were all premised on a consideration of long-term engagement within the artists’ respective communities while recognizing that the ‘community’ would also be different in each case. It’s really that on-the-ground work that brings all of these artists together.”

Kathleen M. Higgins is a K’jipuktuk (Halifax) based arts writer, public servant, and dog aunt.

In September 2012, Eyelevel Gallery, an artist-run centre in North End Halifax, was more than simply a venue to take in contemporary art. It transformed into the headquarters of the World Portable Gallery Convention, complete with a stately desk in the main space, a row of wristwatch faces on the wall displaying international time zones, a red light blinking insistently on an answering machine and refreshments compliments of global social networks served from the in-house Feral Trade Café. While development was officially underway on the downtown Nova Centre, a mammoth complex featuring a $164-million convention centre, convening of a different kind was being explored a kilometre away. For a month, Eyelevel served as a hub for a collection of portable galleries from around the world, each hosting their own unique exhibit. Spaces like Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s Nanomuseum, consisting of twin 2×3” picture frames, and Judy Freya Sibayan’s Museum of Mental Objects, where the artist’s memory holds the work, sought to crack open the ways we experience art.

Artists have always sought alternative exhibition spaces outside the white cube: think Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise, a suitcase that held miniature versions of his oeuvre. WPGC co-curators Michael McCormack and Michael Eddy, considering the current discourse surrounding the much-debated Nova Centre and the value of networking, had the idea to turn Eyelevel “into this larger than life kind of space,” McCormack says. Throughout the month, art was available “by chance or appointment,” meaning the public could stumble upon an exhibit at a local picnic or softball game, or call up the Eyelevel to receive a special delivery. Galleries were dispatched by Fixed Cog Hero, Mathieu Arsenault’s “existential bicycle courier” service, so that art could appear on doorsteps as easily as a box of garlic fingers.

Hannah Jickling’s Coat of Charms is one example of a gallery that travels well. Jickling, who created an online archive of profiles of mobile spaces for Vancouver’s Or Gallery in 2005, curates the inside of a thrift store trench coat. For the WPGC, Jickling exhibited—or flashed—a set of kaleidoscopes by Portland-based collective F* Mtn. “With this iteration of the Coat of Charms, I was really interested in the gesture of flashing with the coat, that exhibitionism somehow provides grounds for an exhibition,” Jickling says. “So when I was wearing it, I got into this gesture and was thinking, what if art-viewing can become this illicit surprise that is non-consensual?” Jickling emphasizes the importance of non-institutional spaces to queer, feminist artists, linking this importance to her role as a “pervert” startling her viewers. “We owe a lot to perverts!” Jickling says. “When we think about portable galleries and their potential, we have to remember the true innovators, the people who see things from the margins and make their own culture all the time.”

McCormack says that one of the things he’s most drawn to in portable galleries is “that one on one, person to person interaction.” Nowhere is this more evident than in Gordon B. Isnor’s Alopecia Gallery, installed on the bald patches in his beard area (“alopecia” means hair loss). Isnor admits that having a gallery on your face can be weird. “I’m sort of socially awkward,” he says. “If I go to parties or social events, my general inclination is to leave very quickly.” So, it’s usually up to others to approach him, but as he reflects, “if (the viewer) does feel shy, they can’t partake at all.” For the WPGC, Isnor exhibited a very quiet audio piece by Duke & Battersby that not only encouraged, but required, a social exchange, as listeners had to almost place their ears directly on his cheek.

For two of the galleries participating in the WPGC, the intimacy lies in the fact that they exist (or existed) in their curators’ homes. 161 Gallon Gallery is a space of diminutive volume in the residence of artists Daniel Joyce and Miriam Moren, while Paul Hammond and Francesca Tallone ran Gallery Deluxe Gallery in their apartment attic from 2005-2007. Hammond and Tallone never conceived of their gallery as mobile until they were invited to resurrect it at the WPGC. “A huge part of the gallery was the sort of ‘transportation’ that occurred when you went up the ladder into what looked like an attic storage space, from a residential kitchen, and suddenly found yourself in another world,” Hammond says. To recreate this experience, the artist being installed, Chris Foster, was also part of the reconstruction, helping to build a wooden box on stilts so that viewers could enter the gallery from below, peeking up to see yet another replica: a miniature motor home toting a gallery.

An element of tongue in cheek goes hand in hand with the unconventional experience of mobile galleries. That blinking red light, for example, was part of the P.R. Rankin Gallery, managed by McCormack and Convention coordinator Elizabeth Johnson, a site for the public to leave prank messages. McCormack explains that, for many of these pieces, “there’s sort of a joke to it, but it’s also serious at the same time.” Often, artists are enjoying the novelty but also being resourceful, reacting to the lack of opportunities, for example, for emerging artists to show their work.

The spirit of portable galleries, Jickling says, “challenges the role of ‘the expert’ and re-invents the terms and conditions under which art is produced and received.”

“It’s been a few years, I’m trying to remember how it started.” Tom Young and I are sitting in the entranceway of the Eyelevel Gallery in Halifax. It’s February and we are at the launchparty for the Black Rabbit Arts Festival, a month-long series of playful events for the arts community.

Black Rabbit features sculptural toboggan races, an amateur lecture series, cardboard costumery, community feasting, workshops and much more. Tom is trying to explain how this North End Haligonian event sprung forth from the week-long White Rabbit Artist Residency and Festival, which he has been hosting at his Red Clay Farm since 2009. “It’s almost like there was an incubation at White Rabbit that led to the creation of Black Rabbit.”

Each summer, the White Rabbit Festival provides an annual opportunity for 15 artists to escape the hustle and bustle of urban life to explore and expand on the potential of the natural world at the edge of the Bay of Fundy. The residency has been likened to a summer camp more than once—not just for the outdoorsy earth connection, but also for the lasting relationships that are built between artists.

“You share this really special and intimate and sort of otherworldly experience,” says Louise Hanavan, who is an organizer of both Rabbits. “Interestingly, when you come back to the city maybe you’re not that close of friends, but whenever you see each other in town you share this really special connection, and there’s this look you give each other because you shared this really surreal experience.”

The surreality of the White Rabbit experience is reflected in the art created throughout the duration of the residency. Each artist seeks out a work site somewhere on the farmland with choices ranging from forested nooks to rounded ponds, sloping orchards and a hidden sauna house. At these sites, most artists use the materials provided by the natural world. Young explains that there is no physical permanence to the installations at White Rabbit: “We didn’t really set any firm conditions on how people made their work. It just had to be something that either fit with the landscape or it was ephemeral. So people could have all kinds of hardware out in the woods, and most of the work has tended to be more ephemeral.”

Halifax artist Brian Riley has been a Rabbit for two years now. He explains that his process was to enter a site and work through the question “How do you spend time in a space and ask it what it wants.” During his first residency he found an old birch tree that had fallen with its various limbs and shards scattered around it. He then organized these pieces into colour gradient spirals. “It’s like combing your hair, like combing the hair of that area,” he muses about his process.

At the end of the week-long residency, the farm opens up to the public for a nighttime festival of art exploration. It’s at this time that the surreal nature of White Rabbit hits its peak. Each site is given a different kind of life as it is entered. The once-isolated location that just held an artist and maybe a radio—playing the White Rabbit pirate radio station—shifts as people weave through the farm’s paths and engage with the works created.

Despite—or because of—the ethereal nature of the art created at White Rabbit and the temporary nature of the brief residency, a separate kind of permanence has evolved. The sense of connection and collaboration between resident Rabbits has extended beyond that summered week and given birth to Black Rabbit.

“The way I see it is that there’s people who built relationships between each other and sort of took away an inspiration from it that has created a really good energy I think,” says Young. He gazes contentedly at the artists and attendees buzzing about Eyelevel Gallery during the Black Rabbit launch party, in which exhibiting artists explored the themes of “light” and “darkness” on the gallery’s walls. Young responded to the needs of a community in need of a playful, wintertime escape: