This past Saturday (19 October) was the 18th celebration of the “Sacred and Profane”, and art festival that takes place just down the road from my house on Peaks Island. It takes place at Battery Steele (See the USM Free Press article. Although I lived on Peaks Island 11 years ago, yesterday’s event was my first time attending. The weather was wonderful, and the venue at Battery Steele (and old WWII concrete bunker) was totally transformed and an enormous amount of effort went into cleaning up Battery Steele, and creating all the art installations.

Of course, Battery Steele is dark as hell (imagine a 200 meter long massive tunnel with 1 meter thick reinforced concrete walls and multiple side rooms and you get the picture), so almost all the photos inside were handheld at iso 3200. All images were taken with a 50mm f/1.4 lens.

Before entering, I was greeted by
some slightly surreal costumed folk (that’s an baby in the giraffe (?) suit; click on images for an enlargement):

and inside, there were performance art/acrobatics:

To darkly-hooded keyboard musicians:

and, my favorite performance piece that really needed to be experienced, reduced here to merely a photograph:

There were also wonderful sculptures that utilized the darkness and engineered lighting to wonderful effect:

All in all, a celebration not to be missed. I can hardly wait till next year.

(In the meantime, I have more images made into a video that I would be happy to send you a link to if you are interested. )