Underground Adventures

On the 26th, we went to the Blanche Nuit festival, which is an annual arts festival that happens here in town. We wisely chose to attend Art Souterrain, which took place entirely in the Underground City.

You can go and read about the Underground City at the above link, but essentially it's a series of underground malls and metro stops connected by tunnels that is located in the downtown area. When Ben takes the Metro into work every morning, he gets off at the McGill metro station and can walk to his work at Place Ville Marie without going above ground. He can also walk to say, Eaton Center, which has a huge food court (including a place to get bahn mi, joy of joys!)

The Underground City generally closes up in the evenings, so it was kind of a special treat to go there around midnight and wander around looking at art. We saw some pieces that we liked--the one in this photo is actually painted on a series of clear acrylic panels that are suspended at the edges, giving it a 3d effect.



This is a moebius strip made out of photographs of the Place Ville Marie area, right near where Ben works.

This is the artist dressed up as a clown, doing portraits of people as clowns (the subject of this one was particularly thrilled to receive a hobo clown portrait of himself), in front of a loop of scary videos featuring clowns. One of the movies had Crispin Glover; I'm not sure what he was doing there.

We might have done more walking around outside--the festival had lots of routes you could walk through the various districts of the city to look at all of the art--but unsurprisingly, it was just too darn cold to do that. Either that or, as I suspect might be the case, I wasn't nearly as drunk as anyone who thought it was a good idea.