Struts brings L'Ambiance to Sappyfest 2026
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
July 31 - August 2
Struts is happy to present L’Ambiance, a series of artist projects running contemporaneous to everyone’s favourite music festival Sappyfest. L’Ambiance includes work by artists Teagan and Jacob and Annie France Noël. Read on for more details.
Porta-Confessional
by Jacob & Teagan
Struts Gallery
Ongoing
Porta-Confessional is a participatory, ephemeral sculptural installation which takes the form of a confessional, constructed as twinned (non-functioning, replica) Porta-Potties. Within this playful, secularized confessional, Sappyfest attendees of all ages are invited into a moment of contemplative reprieve.
Ecologically constructed as a 1:1 scale facsimile from locally-sourced scrap cardboard, this installation foregrounds undisguised, sustainable materialities and invites participants to consider material lifecycles, from construction to consumption, digestion and waste.
Through extreme care and attention to detail in construction, Porta-Confessional takes inspiration from artists like Charlotte Posenenske and Chris Gilmour in elevating and respecting the status of cardboard as an accessible fine art material. Situating the ubiquitous music festival-symbol of the Porta-Potty within a secular-spiritual context endows the quotidian, possibly-unpleasant implications of using a public toilet with a disjointedly humorous sense of contemplative reverence.
Within the installation, audience-participants can engage in “confessional” conversation with a neighbour through a lattice separating the adjacent booths; or they can confess textually, through cathartic graffiti, directly onto the booth’s walls, or by writing onto provided paper scrolls which are then deposited into the vestibule’s substructural plumbing. These variegated modes of activation enliven the installation through actions which are cathartic and socially-engaged without being prescriptive, didactic, or confrontational.
This project, like Sappyfest, inhabits a space of comforting hypnagogia; it is connective, poetic, serious, humorous; it is light and heavy simultaneously, not unlike our Bridge Street hearts.
Jacob & Teagan are Mi’kma’ki (Sackville)-based post-BFA mixed media visual artists, collaborators and friends whose work together has grown out of the spaces in between literature and art. Teagan describes Jacob as a colourfully capped, quietly smiley guy, who secretly wants to talk to you and hear all you have to say; Jacob describes Teagan as a boundlessly-effervescent, unflinching optimist whose capacity for bringing people together can only be explained by magic.
Texere Memoria
by Annie France Noël
Struts Gallery Gallery #3
10am - 5pm Friday, Saturday, Sunday
Annie France Noël will create a hybrid space where installation, performance, and encounters with the public co-exist in relation to her work with sheep’s wool and its various stages of transformation (from raw fleece to weavable thread). This project extends from a body of transdisciplinary works rooted in the traditional folk song «La laine des moutons» (The Wool of the Sheep), which she interprets as an allegory for ruminations on parenthood as performance and on the body as archive; a site of embodied memory carried through touch, repetition, and care. The actions of transforming wool (shearing, skirting, cleaning, picking, brushing, spinning, weaving, wearing, singing…) evoke the complexity of human relationships and the humility required to tend to them.
The public is invited to join Annie France in an intimate nook made of raw sheep fleeces where she’ll tend to various techniques of transformation. Folks may witness and/or take part. Through the shared labour, conversations and exchanges around the themes explored are encouraged.
[Practical information: the wool carries a certain earthy, musky odour, but is typically not overwhelming in a somewhat open space. Wool allergy is rare and is triggered from cutaneous contact with the natural oil (lanolin) contained in untreated wool. While the song is French, Annie France is fully bilingual and can interact in both French and English.]
Annie France Noël is a visual artist, photographer, educator and cultural worker. Her practice lies at the intersection of the invisible and the inexpressible, where she critically addresses realities that are often concealed. Since entering matrescence, she has developed a self-theoretical and transdisciplinary practice involving photography, video performance, craft processes and installation, in which parenthood becomes one anchor point among others for exploring memory, transmission and bodily experience. Annie France lives, mothers and creates on unceded Mi'kma'ki territory (Moncton, NB).
