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Day 4 at Eastern Edge

Yesterday, our walking tour adventure continued as we visited the last five stops on our list.

Rawlin’s Cross is known as St.John’s most confusion intersection. With traffic lights pointing in various angled directions, it’s no wonder people have made maps that specifically tell you how to navigate this crossing.

As we walked to our next stop, Josh noticed a sculpture of a little girl that seemed kind of bizarre to him, so he added the finishing touches to the piece. He calls it “Girl Texting” cast in bronze.

Bannerman Park appears on the Identity Collection as one of the biggest gathering spots in the city. If there isn’t a folk festival happening here, there’s some other type of festival or party brewing.  

In Bannerman Park is the Colonial Building. People see this building as one of the most important historic sites in St.John’s.

As we continued our walk, we stumbled across another street with a row of Jelly Bean houses. This road caught our attention particularly for the colour choices…we temporarily named it Broken City Lab Lane.

Speaking of Jelly Bean houses, the Battery was our second last stop on our tour and it is also the original spot for this style of housing. It stands as the true cultural roots for any Newfoundlander. Also, the view is beautiful.

The view.

Last stop is the infamous Signal hill.

Josh installs the last title card.

The best place to see the city aerial style.

Back at the home base, a video was put together compiling our adventure. We brought this video down to Eastern Edge and had it playing during the Art’s Marathon.

While that was happening, Josh headed over to Staples to pick up our Walking Tour pamphlets.

The map.

Installing our tent at the AM fest.

The pamphlets were laid out for festival dwellers to take.

The video loops.

By the end of the night, more than half of the pamphlets were gone.

Around the gallery, over 75 artists came to participate in the AM festival in various ways. Above, the Eastern Edge wall is taken over by graffiti artists.

The festival ran for 24 hours straight and was a really fun to be a part of. We want to send our biggest thank yous out to Eastern Edge for including us in the festival.

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Day 1 at Eastern Edge

Our first day at Eastern Edge was very eventful and filled with lots of adventures and new discoveries. The main take away from today is that St. Johns, Newfoundland has such a rich history and culture.

The Art Marathon Festival that Eastern Edge annually hosts was already in full swing when we arrived, with local and national artists doing really interesting work all around the city. Everything from performance works to mapping out the city with an intricate stamping systems was happening and we were about to get thrown into this exciting mix with our Public Space Gallery project.

With some of our tools from home, we quickly got to work and began putting together the details for our first workshop.

Josh working in our giving space.

We compiled a list of questions to discuss with the participants that act as entry points to larger questions and discussions that we’re interested in exploring while here.

The goal of the first workshop was to assemble the Public Gallery Collection by discovering the overlooked and under-appreciated parts of St.Johns. Everything from the place that’s most confusing in the city to a place you cannot live without was talked about and the stories shared were fascinating.

On our cab ride from the St.John’s airport to Eastern Edge, we were introduced to Newfoundland’s famous hospitality when our seemingly normal cab ride was turned into a full-fledged tour of the city. The gentlemen driving us down to the gallery was so helpful and excited for us to be visiting that he equipped us with maps, guides, and personally showed us around to all the great spots we need to check out in order to fully understand St.Johns. He even waited to make sure we got into the gallery okay before driving off. Newfoundland hospitality is most definitely not a myth; people here are extremely generous and kind.

The handful of people that showed up for the workshop today were great! They had so many stories to share and really took ownership of the project.

We decided to do a round table discussion of the topics which seemed to pay off. We were able to bounce ideas and experiences off one another, both by locals and visitors.

Discussing.

As the discussions went on, more people became curious and took a seat at the table to give their input.

Jen, an Eastern Edge staff member, referred to a map when trying to remember where a specific site of cultural importance was located.

Josh writes while Charlotte recalls a memory from her childhood.

New topic question.

Around the table.

Josh takes notes and starts to find links.

I switch with Josh to take a stab at the story collecting.

The story wall grows.

By the end of the 2 hour workshop, Josh and I have learnt so many new things about St.Johns, we can’t wait to take to the streets and document all the special nooks and crannies that the participants have shared with us.

The view from outside of Eastern Edge is of Signal Hill. This spot was brought up many different instances during the workshop and will be appearing in our walking tour.

During the workshop, all the places that came up multiple times were compiled into a list and then placed into a google map. It became a preliminary guide for us as we began to walk and photograph these sites.

Above, Josh takes notes on each site.

At every place we visited, we made sure to plot its exact coordinates on our map so that we can transfer them to our walking tour pamphlets.

One of the questions asked during the workshop was, “What is the best place to watch the sunrise/sunset?”, and someone replied by saying on top of this parking garage, so Josh and I went to check it out.

Here’s what we found.

The back of the parking garage shows an interesting view of the downtown area. The topography of this place is pretty awesome.

A screen shot of our map thus far. More soon.

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The Public Space Gallery At Eastern Edge

On Monday, some of us will be heading off to St.John’s Newfoundland to participate in Eastern Edge’s annual AM Festival!

While there, we’ll be creating a project called the Public Space Gallery. This project combines traditional elements found in a gallery space and places them outside in more untraditional public locations. Through a series of workshops, we’ll be collecting stories to interprete and curate into a public gallery. The gallery will contain different collections that will be summed up in a “walking tour” map that festival visitors can choose to experience on their own or take the gallery tour with the Broken City Lab art interpretors and tour guides.

Josh works on the walking tour pamphlet.

An example test shot of how the gallery cards would look outside.

It’s interesting to try and put these up outside and properly frame the space the card pertains to.

The 11 x 17 inch cards definitely have a better presence than the 8.5 x 11. It’s kind of interesting to me that from a distance, it just looks like a white disruption of space.

From a distance.

There are still a lot to decide on and more to create/design before we leave! Back to work. More soon.