Scenes from our Dreams

As a community arts centre that promotes and ensures that our programming is youth-centered and youth-led, we will be working with youth artists throughout September/early October to transform the physical location of the MacPhee Centre (located at 50 Queen Street, Dartmouth) into a large-scale diorama.

Using ideas of surrealism, the passage of time and identity within the nocturnal landscape, we will offer an immersive invitation for the audience to 'see through the looking glass' and transport themselves to the internal world of our youth artists. Prior to Nocturne, through both guided and unstructured facilitation, youth will be able to envision and create art that expresses their teenage mind, and transport the viewer to an internal world they may not usually be privy to. Time in our internal worlds moves differently, and youth will use modalities of painting, sculpture, music, digital projections and more to explore their identity and how they see themselves throughout time, and how they may process life as time passes in various ways. As the audience will only be able to access this collaborative inner landscape exhibit externally, they truly be a viewer looking in from the outside through windows and doorframes, and in this way be transported somewhere they don't quite belong, and might feel familiar yet out of reach.

The MacPhee Centre holds all materials needed to create art with the youth, display and project it as necessary to create this exhibit. The internal building will be closed to Nocturne participants, and there will be external signage describing the exhibit. We do not have any logistical concerns in regards to folks viewing from outside; our windows are large and low to the ground, and we are also framed by a wide sidewalk and are hopeful that this provides more accessibility that the three stories of our internal building. In this way, viewers will be able to derive their own meaning from this unique immersive youth-created experience.