When night began to fall in Saskatoon on Sept. 26, 20th Street was just getting ready to light it right back up. The second annual Nuit Blanche festival brought colourful lights and creative art to a quiet Saturday night.

From Idylwyld Drive to Avenue F, 20th Street West was closed to cars because of a variety of art installations placed along the sides of the street. Optical illusions, flashy lights, creative dancing — Nuit Blanche had it all. In the centre of the road, people doodled and wrote in chalk while children fascinated themselves with the many big balloons secured nearby.

According to their website, Nuit Blanche is a free night-time arts festival that showcases and celebrates arts and culture. For one night only, the public gets a glimpse into the lives of the featured artists.

The theme of this year’s festival was “Interstitial Spaces,” which can be described as the blurring of lines between defined roles or concepts, according to their website. This was evident in the layout of the festival, which brought the viewers and artists closer together by mixing their art in with publicly accessible space.

Among the artists was one of the University of Saskatchewan’s very own, William Lee, a third-year fine arts student who created the piece “Electric Honeycomb.” Six large, white, wooden hexagons lay stacked on the ground, in such a way that they resembled a honeycomb. The edges were lined with aluminum and a light inside brightly light up each hexagon. The honeycomb, with its visible wiring, is reminiscent of the minimalist artwork movement that began in the 1960s. Clean and light, this piece creates a sleek environment for the viewer that is open and aesthetically pleasing.

A popular interactive display was from OPEN, a design collaborative with an on-going relationship with the U of S School of Architecture Initiative. Made out of orange pool noodles, “Orange Crush” was a creatively shaped tunnel that viewers could walk through and take one-of-a-kind selfies.

Another art installation was “12 Hours of Night,” a series of photographs of people from dusk until dawn in various locations in and around Saskatoon. Each photograph was distinct from the other, with the artists present in them. What made this piece unique was the obscuring of the faces of the artists with various objects, from paper bags and bubble wrap to a blinding sunrise.

The result was an eye-catching assembly, projected on a large screen which made the project more personal to viewer. This project, organized in part by U of S professor Jennifer Crane from the department of art and art history, was a joint collaboration by third-year interactive systems design student Kyle Zurevinski and fourth-year studio arts students Emily M. Koehlert, Michelle Gagne and Samra K. Sheikh. This installation was a tribute to a 2014 video performance done by Canadian artist Lisa Birke titled “Calendar Girls.”

One of the larger attractions that really lit up Nuit Blanche was an artistic representation of the Canadian Light Source’s synchrotron by a group of artists. Shining, fast paced, multi-coloured lights shot around the top of the artwork, drawing in crowds of people — especially small, very excited children. A table nearby provided diffraction glasses that, when you put them on, provided a crazy, colourful experience. Diffraction glasses are lenses that spread light out through passing it through apertures — holes through which light can travel — to split the beams, producing bursts of colour. Glowing, colourful yo-yos were also given out and were popular entertainment for many people.

Like a picture from a hipster’s blog, you could see people riding bikes decorated in neon light, friends laughing together as they ate, coffee shops with line-ups and people from different backgrounds and cultures all joined together for a night of entertainment and discovery. Under the light of a large, bright moon, Nuit Blanche was the place to be for a beautiful night out with friends and family.