All I want to do is take pictures: Nocturne: Art at Night

Art happens often. Art at night happens once a year.
At least, in Halifax.

It's called Nocturne, and it's an annual celebration of all the creativity the city has to offer. The downtown streets fill with people, and art galleries, busker-types, and random doors you never noticed before come alive in a city core open-house. This year was my first visit, and it was pretty darn extraordinary.

There was so much to see that I can really never do it justice. I'll start in the galleries on the south end of Barrington St, and, of course, I make no claim to the art in the photos.

Up the road a bit, in the basement of a building I'm pretty sure I could never find again...

At the Page & Strange Gallery, the place was stocked with dots. That's right: just green and pink paper dots. Visitors were invited to stick the dots to the walls, the display stands, the floor, the ceiling, the windows.... anywhere you could reach, and in any shape or style your brain could come up with.

People were lined up out the door the join in.

This is just a small section: the place was absolutely COVERED. Even the negative dots from the cutouts in the original paper were being used. It was pretty surreal actually.

In a small back room of the gallery, there were 'perspective' paintings, and this one was hands down my favourite. Mind = blown.

Next door:

All the art wasn't graphic media. All of it wasn't even indoors.

The man in the moon was available to read anything you wanted to write down and send up on his little bucket pulley. Some of it was bizarre, some of it was motivational, and more than once there was a wedding proposal!

The window display at the belly dance studio was strangely mesmerizing.

and this, though not my best photography work by any stretch, was really fun to read:

It was about eleven o'clock when I decided I had taken in all I could. It was then that I realized I was downtown, at night, with my camera, and this wasn't going to happen again any time soon.

Parade Square:

Dartmouth:

The boardwalk:

and these streetlights, which were actually an art exhibit called "Got Drunk and Fell Down."

I'm not joking.

The one in back there occasionally 'relieves itself" into the harbour.

Thinking I had done all the shooting I was going to do for the night, I headed to the bus stop. Then I kept going.
There was one more thing that needed taking care of and this opportunity didn't knock often enough.

This is the MacDonald Bridge, one of two such spans that connect Halifax and it's sister city Dartmouth.

At approximately midnight, after chatting with a security officer...

("Were you aware that you were on property owned by the Department of National Defence?"

"Oh, really? Well, I suppose that makes sense. Do I have to leave?"

"No, just wanted to make sure you were aware.")

I walked across this darn thing.