Hello young or not so young lover of The Turret!
Short version
We, artist Liam Ross and archivist Dan MacKay, want to take some photos, make some photographic art, and record some stories, of The Turret before a massive reno starts in a few weeks. The space has been declared an asbestos apocalypse so we need a few hundred bucks for hazmat suits. Please scroll to the bottom, hit the button, and donate what you can for this photo and storytelling project.
(there’s also a “In related news” at the bottom.)
Longer version
There has been good technical photographic documentation of the space done already, but local photographic artist Liam Ross would like to do an artful documentation; I would like to do some archival work - specifically collect some stories about what was where and what went on, by spending some leisurely time there with Reg Giles, who has a memory of the time and space like a steel trap.
The Turret space is about to undergo a quite dramatic renovation and there is a chance that there will be small or large or total erasure of some of the elements there that you loved.
This project has been a couple months in the making; we’ve been corresponding with the Turret Arts Space Society, they’ve been corresponding with the contractors. Yesterday, we got the go-ahead, with a catch: that we must pay for our disposable hazmat suits, which will be a few hundred dollars.
The photos we do will have a variety of destinations:
- I anticipate that Liam will make some kind of visual artwork,
- I’ll post some good ones in a Wayves article,
- We’ll make a slideshow of the ones that tell a story, and
- we’ll archive them all.
Statement from The Artist
My name is Liam Ross, I’m an artist based in Nova Scotia who works in a variety of media; primarily bookbinding, ink-drawing (with hand-made inks), and experimental photography. After reading Rebecca Rose’s excellent 2019 book Before The Parade, I became interested in the current state of The Turret building on Barrington Street. My artistic practice focuses on navigating the legacies of life, work, and activism in Nova Scotia, as well as the relationship between architecture and people, so I’ve been drawn to this space which has sat largely unused for years now. People who explore unused buildings will tell you that they are never empty; their histories are scrawled on their surfaces like a palimpsest, written and erased and written again. The Turret is about to be given a second life as the Turret Art Space, but it must be changed radically to do this.
The transformation of The Turret is happening at an interesting time in the LGBTQ rights movement. The movement is becoming something that has a beginning in the distant past, outside of living memory, rather than something that is only happening now. The youngest activists find themselves excavating that past for meaning, context, and wisdom; work that delivers terrifyingly ambiguous results, but necessary work all the same, because the challenges we’ve faced leave us no choice. The AIDS Crisis sits like a cluster of broken synapses in our collective brain, a dark oculus where there should be knowledge but there is only silence.
The asbestos has nothing to do with the AIDS Crisis, which has nothing particular to do with the Turret building. That’s just where the asbestos happens to be, and the Turret just happened to hit its peak on the eve of the crisis. But I know they are all connected. Like radioactive fallout, it bloomed in the building and created a pandemic that killed so much of what it touched. If I want to stand in the footsteps of my elders, I have to wear a hazmat suit just to get close, which will never be close enough - because it isn’t now, and those people aren’t here. It’s become a palimpsest.
The goal, if this project is successful, will be to get as close as I can.
In Related News
On the afternoon of April 16, Emily Davidson, founding member and President of the Turret Arts Space Society, will be delivering a talk and Q&A about the project, hosted by The Elderberries. If you’re not on the Elderberries mailing list, but would like to attend the talk, please register by email.
If we raise more money than we need, the excess will go to the Dartmouth MacFee Center 2SLGBTQ+ Youth Project.
You can help this art and archival project by donating a few dollars, or a lot of dollars, via:
- with any credit card, use the button below,
- an etransfer to ads@wayves.ca, again please note "Turret Photo Project" or,
- a cheque to Wayves, 3247 Union St, Halifax, B3K 5H2 (note Turret Photo Project on it, please).
Thank you for supporting this project.
