What: Integrate Arts Festival
When: Friday and Saturday
Where: Various locations
Tickets: Free or by donation Friday (some galleries rever to admission prices Saturday)
It’s that time of year again when Victoria is preparing to transform into a playground for the arts, as 29 art spaces around the city open their doors to the public for the eighth annual Integrate Arts Festival.
But what was once only a nighttime crawl has developed into a twinned event. This year, Integrate will continue Saturday with a daytime, family-friendly guided cycling tour. While a free hop-on-hop-off bus will take art fans around the downtown core during Friday night’s crawl, the shift to cycling on Saturday means the tour can expand to include art spaces further away.
“In order to really set ourselves apart, we wanted to focus on the transportation aspect and the experience of getting to multiple galleries and multiple art spaces during one event,” festival director Zahra Stark said.
“We’ve added a bike tour Saturday to reach out to Fernwood and Oak Bay, to integrate more of the CRD and provide a different avenue for the experience of those art spaces.”
The Integrate Arts Festival begins Friday at 6 p.m. with an opening reception at The HQ (1501 Douglas St.). The launch features installations by local artists, performances and live music.
The Big Blue Bus will circulate participants throughout downtown between 7:30 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.
Saturday’s bike tour leaves The HQ at 10 a.m. After travelling through Victoria and Oak Bay, the tour ends at 3 p.m. at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria.
Kids can participate in family-friendly activities throughout the day on Saturday at The HQ.
Art crawlers are also welcome to take their own path between art spaces on foot or by bike.
“We have about 29 different art spaces involved this year and it’s about getting people to come together for this one event,” Stark said.
In addition to the traditional galleries, look for art in less likely spaces. The Integrate Pop-Up Gallery in Market Square (148-560 Johnson St.) features local artist Michel Matil’s show Infinity in Colour, musical duo Theta and video landscape artist Anna Shkuratoff. The Greater Victoria Public Library hosts the Play on Words Literary Fair in the central branch’s courtyard Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. And creators of all kinds are invited to Helmcken Alley before the festival kick-off to create new signs for a Victoria arts centre, during the Where’s Open Space? workshop.
Here are a few sample art projects to check out:
The path down the breakwater at Ogden Point will be a little more personal, beginning Saturday.
That’s when the Inside Out Project Victoria will paste 225 large portraits along the ground, as part of an international art project.
“It’s an award-winning global art project started by a street artist from Paris,” said Sheila Alonzo. “Basically, any city in the world can use this method of creating a public art installation using portraits of people.”
The idea, according to the Inside Out Project website, is to give everyone the opportunity to share their portrait and make a statement about what they stand for.
Nearly 200,000 people from more than 112 countries and territories have participated.
“Each city will pick a statement about what they care about in the community. For us here in Victoria, living on an Island surrounded by water, we decided our statement would be, ‘Community for a clean coast,’ ” Alonzo said.
The posters are about 0.9 metres by 1.2 metres in size.
The Inside Out Project Victoria will also have a photo booth at Artlandia, during the Rifflandia music festival, where festival-goers can print their own portraits.
What’s Your Story?
That’s the question that artists at the Ministry of Casual Living are asking art crawlers, through a collaborative community art piece called the Story Booth Project.
During the day, the studio at 1060 North Park will act as a recording booth, where visitors can record their stories about the city, about specific places in the city, or about their own experiences.
At night, those stories will be transformed into a multimedia projection, with visual elements layered over the oral clips. At the moment, organizers are experimenting with shadow-puppetry to complement the stories they collect. However, the visual output may change with time.
“We’ve been experimenting with a lot of ideas around history itself. What does it mean to codify history in a textbook, as opposed to oral history? We’ve been interested in alternative paths, marginalized histories and the things that have been swept under the rug,” artist Aubrey Burke said.
Part of the appeal is also collecting contemporary urban folklore, where legend and gossip blends with what really happened.
It’s also about shedding new light on the city’s spaces and its people.
“We walk through the city every day and take everything for granted,” Burke said.
“We’re trying to create that kind of feeling where you sit down with a good friend and they tell you a story. And you’re like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that about you. I didn’t know that about the city.”
The Story Booth Project will run through September.
Victoria’s “outdoor art gallery” in Commercial Alley is getting its next installation.
Local artist Roy Green has been selected as the next artist to design four panels for the brick passageway running between Yates Street and Bastion Square.
“We thought that Roy’s work could bring a new voice to the potential avenues that street art could take with new stylistic techniques,” said curatorial assistant Alexis Hogan. “His work is really vibrant and his characters are dynamic.”
Green has created four large panels featuring local birds: the great blue heron, pileated woodpecker, rufuos hummingbird and the red-winged blackbird.
The panels will be unveiled Friday at 7:30 p.m. and will remain in Commercial Alley for six months.