21-23 May, 2015
The Khyber presented ART IN FEST and acted as artist lounge and performance space during The OBEY Convention VIII.

ART IN FEST is a standalone festival of multi-disciplinary contemporary art based in Halifax, suffused with the spirit of the OBEY Convention and presented in partnership with the Khyber Centre for the Arts. In 2015 the festival showcased all new and intriguing works from local artists Craig Leonard, Brandon Brookbank + Kyle Alden Martens, as well as by national artists Francesca Tallone, Emily Pelstring and Katherine Kline.
1.1/ EMILY PELSTRING: Standard Play
Venue: The Khyber Centre for the Arts, 5521 Cornwallis St.
On view: 21 May – 10 June, 2015
Standard Play is a series of imaginative conjectures based on memories of adolescent rituals of media consumption. The installation offers three interpenetrating scenes: two sisters have fallen asleep with the TV on (Sleepers); distorted voices offer an expressionistic tour of the inside of a VCR (Head Cleaner); and a supernatural feminine being appears as an apparition (Quantum Feminist Sanctorium). Materials and objects, in varying physical or mediated transfigurations, pervade each scene, as relics from one moment in a transformation from girlhood to womanhood. Tongue-in-cheek commentary on entertainment technology’s fraught relationship to individual agency and identity, and its role in the standardization of expression and behaviour, underlies a loosely suggested coming-of-age narrative.
Hand-drawn and digital animation, analog video effects, re-photography and video feedback transform images issuing from an apparently malfunctioning machine. The reflective surfaces of TV screens are implicated as projections onto glass within miniature sets.
1.2/ THE POWERS
Performance: 5-6:30PM Thursday 21 May, 2015
The Powers integrates video, dance, costumes and experimental electronic music. It is the collaborative brainchild of Katherine Kline and Emily Pelstring.
Emily Pelstring is an artist and animator who obtained her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Concordia University. Emily’s work includes numerous music videos and concert visuals and has been shown internationally in galleries and film festivals.
Katherine Kline is currently doing her doctorate in Communication Studios at Concordia, where she studies the psychoanalytic unconscious and ecological theory. Kline plays music in Dreamcatcher with Blake Hargreaves, and works with artists Leyla Majeri and Emily Pelstring.
This exhibition was presented through partnership and with technical support from Centre for Art Tapes.
—
2/ BRANDON BROOKBANK+KYLE ALDEN MARTENS: Peel

Venue: The Fruit Stand, 2595 Robie St.
Opening: 5-6PM Friday 22 May, 2015
On view: 12-5PM Saturday 23 – Sunday 24 May, 201
Peel contrasts reality against fiction.
Peel places stale humor upon issue.
Peel deconstructs pieces of identity.
Peel aims to queer.
Peel references our bodies and experiences.
a photographic / sculptural installation.
Brandon Brookbank + Kyle Alden Martens are a collaborative duo that has been working together since 2011. Both are recent graduates from media arts programs at NSCAD University. They use objects of banality to create gestural references to their own identities within society.
—
3/ FRANCESCA TALLONE: Slow Moving Liquid
Venue: The Bus Stop Theatre, 2203 Gottingen St.
Screening: 11:30PM-1AM Saturday 23 May, 2015
Slow Moving Liquid is a short series of videos of waves crashing, silent, on various shores, and slowed-down to create the illusion of a distortion in our sense of time when in the presence of a rhythmic, involuntary system of time-based events.
Francesca Tallone is a Montreal-based photographer and curator. She has exhibited her work throughout North America and Europe, and has curated work in the US, Germany, Ukraine and Canada. While living in Halifax, she co-directed Gallery Deluxe Gallery for 2 years, and has since been curating online galleries and large exhibits in Montreal. Wanderlust is one of her biggest inspirations.
—
4/ CRAIG LEONARD: sfz
Venue: Piers 22-24, 1055 Marginal Rd.
Ongoing: 21 May – 24 May, 2015
sfz is an aeolian percussive sculpture spanning 12,000 feet of asphalt best experienced quietly at twilight.
Craig Leonard is an artist, musician (with Catbag and Guilt) and teacher at NSCAD University since 2006.