Lucy Pullen | Poems

Lucy Pullen

Poem

Halifax, Canada: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2000

70 x 450 cm.

Edition size unknown

Commercially produced rolls of wallpaper, created as part of a series by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design faculty and alumni. Other artists who participated include Lawrence Weiner, Monica Tap, John Baldessari, Kelly Mark, Garry Neill Kennedy, Katie Bush, Geruld Ferguson, David Askevold, Sally McKay, Jan Peacock and John Greer. 

Pullen's contribution is based on a 1999 blue pen drawing.

A few last Nocturne photos

Eleanor King's seven "Anchor" projects for Halifax' Nocturne event on Saturday included Kelly Mark's Everything and Nothing (see earlier post), Ears Under the Atlantic by Chris Myhr (top photo, link here), Arrivals/Departures by Michael Fernandez (centre photos, link here), Lucy Pullen's Interval for Halifax (see prior post), Innerland by Isabelle Hayeur (bottom photo, link here), Julian Higuerey Núñez and Henry Adam Svec's Nocturne Survey and Critical Race. We didn't stumble upon the latter, though based on their CBC interview earlier in the day, I suspect it was great. Link here. Pics of my own two videos to follow.

Lucy Pullen | Interval for Halifax

There were many highlights of the Nocturne festival in Halifax last weekend, but one of my favorites was Lucy Pullen's Interval for Halifax, which managed to be both discreet and a crowd-pleaser. A series of seven children's swings were installed throughout the city, hanging from trees and posts and appearing as rudimentary play things. But they were sheathed in reflective Scotchlite, so when the inevitable photo-documentation occurred (as culture is increasingly reduced to background imagery for Facebook and Instagram selfies) the flash illuminates the swing. The effect is not noticeable in person, but when reviewing the photographs the swings appear ghostly and glowing, as if an aura had been captured.

Above: an audience member tries it out as her friends take pictures, and Nocturne curator Eleanor King swings.

For more information, visit the Nocturne site, here.

The somewhat tenuous link to artists' books and multiples, is that Pullen used the same material about a decade ago for a Bookcover published by Art Metropole. The buyer sent in the dimensions of a favorite book and Pullen produced a dustjacket made of the reflective material, which would sit dormant on your bookshelf, activated only by a flash photograph.

For more information, visit Art Metropole, here.

Nocturne

Saturday night I'm participating in Nocturne, alongside Isabelle Hayeur, Kelly Mark, Lucy Pullen and many others. Curated this year by Eleanor King, Nocturne is an annual free fall festival, not dissimilar to Toronto's Nuit Blanche. Galleries stay open until midnight and new commissioned installations and performances are presented throughout the city. For more information about the event, visit the Nocturne site, here.

I'm presenting two video projections, Postcript and Timeline. The latter is a 60 minute video consisting of over 500 establishing shots from cinema and television, arranged chronologically by diegetic, or dramatic time, rather than by production date. The piece begins in 17,000 BC and works its way up to the present (every year of the 19th and 20th century are accounted for) and then moves away from historical dramas to science fiction, continuing a few thousand years into the future.

The excerpted images above represent every film from the work about an artist, musician, composer or author.