HALIFAX - The process by which Rank Inc.’s new business super-complex, Nova Centre, was approved by HRM Council has lacked significant public input since the early stages of development in 2005. The investment of over $50 million dollars per government has, over the last year, prompted community interest groups, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, journalists, and Halifax MP Megan Leslie to direct attention to the lack of due public consultation, especially since the majority of those polled are against it.  The unanimous municipal, provincial and federal funding raises questions about government responsibility to public interest. HRM Open Projects gave artist Scott Saunders the space and means to address this conflict. His installation of Town Square, 100 mannequin figures wearing business suits strewn across the rubble foundation of the former Chronicle Herald building, is an artwork that is not a solution to the outcome of private wheeling and dealing, but is one response to it.

Editor: Spacing is pleased to continue our partnership with the National Film Board of Canada to showcase films and interactive projects from their online screening room. Julie Matlin of the NFB will be occasionally posting films here on Spacing that explore public spaces, Canadian or international cities and anything urban. The NFB is one of Canada's greatest resources. Click here to view their entire online collection. Over the weekend, in conjunction with ...

HALIFAX - Councillor Linda Mosher’s recent comparison of street art to vandalism and graffiti has brought a variety of reactions. One of the most extreme counterarguments? That all street art is legitimate, and that the city itself is a sketchbook. We wanted to ask a street artist how they felt about the recent attack on graffiti art.  Jei Jei Steeves is both within and staunchly unique from the Halifax urban art milieu. She’s a Halifax artist whose stickers of stray kittens have been popping around the city's streets to say things like "Your lopsided breasts are really beautiful," "I support the troops but I don't support the war," and "I don't like the way you're looking at my tits."

WHAT: Parchetypes, Public Performance - HRM Open Project WHEN: Starting today, August 15th, 11am-1pm - September 11, 2011 WHERE: Point Pleasant Park HOW MUCH: Free HALIFAX, NS - Parchetypes is a site-specific performance created by artist, William Robinson for Point Pleasant Park and supported through the Halifax Regional Municipalities Open Projects program. In concert with this project, Robinson explains, Parchetypes is based on two real-life personalities who define the experience of attending Point Pleasant Park through their musical performances. These two parchetypes or fathers of the park use this extraordinary urban forest in order to nurture the park’s natural elements and entertain park-goers with their musical expressions. The first I have encountered as an anonymous bag piper. His disembodied sounds are a common auditory occurrence and are part of the Point Pleasant Park experience on any given summer day. Like a living ghost nestled in the park’s forest this musical patriarch offers up his kinship with the park by leaving only trace chanters and drones from his pipes into the wind. The second is an elder who provides an embodied auditory experience. Like a guardian to the park he plays fiddle music on his small portable cassette tape stereo at the Tower Road entrance. As the park’s proverbial gatekeeper he provides a transitional point by projecting a unique tone onto the park experience.

SACKVILLE - Last weekend saw Sappy Fest Six energize the otherwise quiet summer streets of beautiful Sackville, New Brunswick. The festival features a diversity of musical acts, workshops and art installations that take place in a variety of venues, including Uncle Larry’s Billiards Hall, the Royal Canadian Legion and a Main Stage Tent that closes down Bridge Street, downtown Sackville’s main commercial thoroughfare. The effect is a unique experience of urban space, where otherwise ordinary features of the town become the backdrops of incredible musical experiences. The festival is an opportunity for Sackville to showcase itself, and submit its streets, structures and parks to transformation and reconsideration by visiting festival-goers and resident Sackvillers alike.

HALIFAX - What happens when the public space of the city intervenes in the private experience of art? Find out when panelists Kim Morgan (Chair) – NSCAD University, Sol Nagler (Chair) - NSCAD University, Martha Radice – Dalhousie University,Nathan Ryan - NSCAD University, Ellen Moffat – University of Saskatchewan, Erin Wunker – Dalhousie University come together to contemplate inteventions of art in public space. Members of the panel present the initial stages of an interdisciplinary SSHRC-funded research/creation project that uses emerging technologies to explore the interstitial space between the private and the public in relation to art. “Art” for us includes visual art, performing arts, and other streams of creative culture such as architecture, design and literature. We define public urban space as those spaces in the city that are accessible to everyone (regardless of ownership), in which strangers interact in many different ways. People’s experience of art is typically private, whether or not the art is in a collective setting. They move through the art gallery in the bubble of their own personal space. They watch films ensconced in the dark of the cinema. Their emotional reactions to art are located in the body, and divulged to just a few companions. However, some members of the panel suggest that the public space of the city can challenge and interfere with the private experience of art. Indeed, they posit that the public space of the city can creatively be made to intervene in the private space of engagement with art.

HALIFAX - Nothing could be more delicious than a chance to enter the beautiful Halifax homes we pass, as citizens moving through the city streets, wondering at their interiors. From the outside, 6080 South Street is a charming grey house wearing the words ‘Acadia Cottage’ above its entrance. It bears the markers of an award winning Historical Halifax Property, and I first saw it as holding intimate pasts worth knowing. During the afternoon of Sunday, April 10th, this picturesque cottage, as well as a Victorian home and a Cobb Home, located on Inglis Street and Victoria Road respectively, opened themselves up for special guest visitors for Dalhousie Art Gallery’s fundraising event Art at Home. Their owners graciously led guests through their homes, and shared stories of love and wisdom for a tiny piece of built Halifax history. Amidst their listeners, there were enchanted feelings of nostalgia and curiosity which drove each of them inside. As I opened the dark wooden door of 6080, with its imposing cast iron knocker, to the sun-drenched streets of South Street, a mass of gleeful guests came inside, their tickets held warmly. They had come to hear stories of their neighborhood homes, and to enjoy the magnificent art collections and original creations that each held within its bosom.

HALIFAX –  The Centre for Art Tapes (CFAT) welcomes visiting artist Sharon Switzer for a week-long residency at CFAT, a street-level exhibition of her work and an artist talk as part of the Halifax Independent Filmmakers Festival (HIFF). Switzer’s video series I Should Be Dreaming Of Butterflies will be installed in the windows of 1658 Barrington Street from the 5th through to the 8th of April, during the Festival. WHAT: Public Realm screening - Sharon Switzer WHERE: 1658 Barrington Street WHEN: April 5 - 8, 2011, dusk - 11pm HOW MUCH: Free