The best of Nuit Blanche in Edmonton, Saskatoon and Winnipeg

The place to be this weekend was Saskatoon… and Edmonton and Winnipeg. Nuit Blanche hit those cities Saturday with all the colourful spectacle the art festival has been known to create. Maybe you couldn't be there to sleeplessly soak up every second. Maybe you just don't have any Instagram friends out west. Whatever the situation, CBC Arts has rounded up some photo highlights, starting with…

Saskatoon

Where are you? Well, literally speaking, this picture was captured on Saskatoon's 20th Street, where you'd have found Regina brothers Ryan and Eric Hill's lenticular-esque installation, Where Are You? There You Are!

Further down 20th Street, Sasktaoon Nuit Blanchers stumbled into a one-of-a-kind performance — the acrobatic yoga-informed dance (or "acroyoga!") of Element.

Hopefully the Nuit Blanchers who Instagrammed those dance photos didn't have their heads in their phones while they continued into the night, otherwise they might have run face-first into…

Portal, a web of plastic stretch wrap, that packaged up a 20th Street intersection. Ontario's Daniel Griffin Hunt is the artist responsible.

That title, Portal, also kind of describes the installation a few blocks away in Saskatoon's Victoria Park. The space was transformed by Caitlind R.C. Brown and Wayne Garrett's The Deep Dark, a series of illuminated doorways, inviting Nuit Blanchers to take a night-time stroll…

And take a bunch of videos while they're at it…

Whoa! Where'd they go? On camera, The Deep Dark doubles as an interdimensional wormhole. Step through the door and you'll instantly vanish!

Or maybe you'll come out the other side in…

Winnipeg

...where Nuit Blanchers loved capturing the light paintings Kyle Schappert was spinning out downtown.

Winnipeg Instagrammers "heart" light painting, for sure.

And they came out en masse to party while a mural was painted, live, in the Exchange district.

Cyclist group the Rainbow Trout bike jam met there, too, riding as a mob into the night.

They toured the city by bike, drinking in installations like this one…

It's called Archipelaglow, a sea of blue balloons that lit up downtown over several city blocks.

Edmonton

Balloons. Edmonton had loads of those, too.

Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed packed a downtown pedway with orange inflatables for Half the Air in a Given Space. Even if you've outgrown the Chuck E Cheese ball pit, this installation demanded participation.

Where else did Edmonton go? Rice Howard Way for Where Did You Go? By The Orange Girls.

At 11pm, the whole city was a stage — figuratively speaking, at any rate. Toronto's Brandon Vickerd brought four high-rise construction cranes to life, animating them in a choreographed routine for Dance of the Cranes.

From construction, to destruction… Elsewhere downtown, VSVSVS steamrolled everything and your old fish tank for Make it Flat.

Wish you'd been there? Maybe someone in Edmonton, wished you were there, too.

Yoko Ono's Wish Tree project asked visitors to hang their hopes on 121 trees in Churchill Square. Now that Nuit Blanche is over, those messages will be sent to the Imagine Peace Tower in Iceland, and the trees will be planted throughout the Edmonton area.

Want to see more photos from these Canadian Nuit Blanche events? Follow the hashtags #nbwpg for Winnipeg, #nbyeg2015 for Edmonton and #nbyxe15 for Saskatoon.