This past weekend, you could find poems by a poet finding their love for themself scattered around Broadway Street.

This was one of the artworks that made up OUTSaskatoon’s Winter Festival Eleganza Extravaganza, held from March 11 to 14. The festival featured five art installations, as well as four audio installations accessible via QR scan codes. These works of poetry, visual art and audio recordings by local artists were scattered around the Broadway area, the University Bridge, Riversdale and downtown for people to find.

The festival encouraged Saskatoonians to get outside, as OUTSaskatoon made public only the general location of the installations, allowing people to find them as they enjoyed a winter stroll.

Around the Broadway area were installations by poet Peace Akintade and an audio recording by an anonymous storyteller. 

Akintade used the entire Broadway area for her poem “A Road to Self Love,” with poetry fragments stationed along the streets for people to read, and bigger pieces found in the gazebo in front of Victoria Ecole School. With them, she expressed her journey to self-love.

The piece by the anonymous artist is called “Staying in Tonight,” and is about gender closets. The anonymous artist talks about their experience being non-binary and feeling pressured to constantly perform coming out.

The University Bridge area was a site for installations by the Sask. Youth Poet Laureate 2019, Alasdair Rees, and by visual artist and poet Kammy Alexson. 

Rees’ piece was an interactive installation where scanning a QR code and looking out over the water let the viewer experience the art, titled New Message from Alasdair. 

Alexson’s installation called Dreamscapes explored the dream realms and her experiences as a keeper of the shadowed visitors. Incorporating the Contemplation Circle beside the Shakespeare on the Saskatchewan amphitheater, she used recycled materials to create colourful dreamcatchers, tied with personal medicines that moved with the wind.

Downtown along the river were two audio pieces by international poet Amberlin Hsu and local poet Robert Grier. 

Hsu’s piece, Good Morning to Good Night, is about her love for her wife and how she is constantly thinking about her. She talks about their journey of proposing to each other and how they manage their long distance relationship. 

Grier’s audio recording discusses how he met his husband and how different their experiences were growing up, with his husband being closeted for most of his life and Grier himself coming out as a child. Grier discusses his journey with loving himself as well as his husband. 

The last three pieces were in the Riversdale area and included art by visual artist Jo Van Lambalgen, visual artist Ashely Marshall and storyteller Lauriel Chang. 

Lambalgen’s installation, Outside the Box, reflects on breaking gender barriers and choosing your own colours. The piece is a large cube featuring many different vibrant colours, and encouraged viewers to choose a colour that resonated with them. 

Marshall’s piece, Light the Path, brings in her Hungarian heritage and shone a light on the Meewasin walking trail with lanterns lit by solar powered lights. The lanterns made of clay bring together references to Hungarian ruins and Saskatchewan snow through the carvings and the paint she used. 

Love is Love, Chang’s audio recording, discusses the stigmas around bisexuality and her first relationship with a woman. She talks about coming to terms with being bisexual and understanding that she does not need to be with a man to have a family and be a proud woman.

The OUTSaskatoon winter festival celebrated the Saskatoon LGBTQ2S+ community and the artists within it. Spreading the installations across the city, the festival aimed to get the city of Saskatoon involved, and told stories of queer love, challenged norms and shared artists’ expressions of self love. 

Even though the festival is over, people are still able to access the audio installations via QR codes by scanning the photos on OUTSaskatoon’s Instagram page. 

Queer love is something to be celebrated, and OUTSaskatoon made sure Saskatoon had the opportunity to do so this weekend. 

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Holly Gilroy | Contributing Reporter

Photos: Holly Gilroy | Contributing Reporter