Third Shift Festival Shifts Format For 2020 Event
SAINT JOHN — A popular public art festival in uptown Saint John is shifting its format a little this year.
Organized by Third Space Gallery, Third Shift brings public art installations, interventions, performances and projections in the heart of uptown Saint John and offers citizens an opportunity to engage with contemporary art and re-imagine their city.
For the past several years, the festival has been held one night a year in August, but with Covid-19 impacting large gatherings, organizers have decided to make the festival a week-long, with both physical and digital art installations.
“We decided to go ahead with Third Shift. It’s a very flexible event because the goal is to share contemporary art with Saint John,” says Third Space’s executive director Kate Buckley. “So we were pretty excited that we can adapt pretty quickly.”
Instead of the usual one-night-only event, this year’s festival will take place from August 21 through August 28.
“It will be expanded to prevent that one gathering event,” says Buckley. “Throughout that week there will be a series of physical installations of artworks that are weather resistant to leave out in the open for a week. Those will be scattered throughout the uptown area for people to go visit on their own time.”
This year will also include a series of digital programming such as live-streamed performances on social media.
“We will also have some of the artworks just living on our website to be interacted with throughout the week,” says Buckley. “It’s kind of a three-pronged event.”
The artists for this year’s festival have been selected and organizers are finalizing details about their projects. With the quick change in format due to Covid-19, some artists had to make changes to their projects.
Fredericton-based artist Kelly Hill was one of them. Her original proposal was a project involving film projection. With the new format, she’s pivoted to doing a performance piece that will stream on social media.
Though she was initially disappointed about having to scrap her original project, she says she’s embracing learning about doing her art in the digital space.
“Now that I’ve come up with this other project, it has really gotten me thinking in a very different way about what it is that’s important to me about the medium that I use and what needs to be physical and what needs to be analog and what I can compromise on or use more modern technology to get it out there to more people,” she says.
“It closes some doors, but also opens some up.”
Last year’s event brought out approximately 3,500 people to uptown Saint John. But since the festival is a week-long and also partially online, Buckley expects that number to grow this year.
“We’re expecting a lot more engagement this year just because of the longer time period, because of the online nature of a lot of the artworks,” she says. “So the reach will hopefully extend beyond Saint John and beyond New Brunswick, even beyond Canada. If we have some shares going on, that would be great.”
With many large gatherings and festivals in the province being canceled this year, Third Shift is uniquely positioned to adapt to social distancing measures. Plus, after six years, Buckley says it was time to change things up anyway.
“We didn’t even consider cancelling because the goal is to make art happen and to pay artists for their work and we have some very generous and supportive sponsors that we really count on, so we knew that it was possible to do Third Shift in a new and different way,” she says.
“It’s exciting because it’s the sixth year that Third Shift is happening. It’s time to switch it up a bit. I didn’t really expect a global pandemic to be the thing for that, but we’re prepared to adapt.”