I was responsible for summarizing the years at Modern Fuel between 2007 and 2017. The text of my presentation, which I had to deliver quickly so that I could squeeze it all in, was as follows:
Modern Fuel : A Work in Progress, 2017.
It is a real honor for me to be here and to have been asked
to speak about the last ten years of activity at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre.
I was only there for the first five out of the ten, and though I’ve followed
the gallery since I moved away from Kingston at the end of 2012, I can only
speak more knowledgeably about the time I was here, and so there may be a
number of gaps in my presentation.
Preparing for this talk, I was reminded of how the task of
organizing a 30th Anniversary event and exhibition fell to me soon
after I started working as the Artistic Director in 2007. The exhibition came
to have the title Instances: 30 Years of
Modern Fuel and the K.A.A.I. and it was based on the collection of KAAI/MFARC
documents stored in the Queen’s University Archives. [Note: K.A.A.I. or the
Kingston Artist’s Association, Incorporated, was the original name of the
organization. I think staff changed it to Modern Fuel because they got tired of
answering the phone, “Hello, K.A.A.I., how can I help you?”] The exhibition
addressed the need to preserve and document the histories of alternative art
practices and politics in Kingston at the same time that it questioned the
accessibility of that past, the reliability of memory, and the very
impossibility of presenting a total account, that any history will be partial,
selective, and subjective. These themes were underscored by presenting an oral
history of the centre with a memorable event from each year of its existence recalled
by an individual involved with the gallery at that time. These memories were
recorded for an audio guide and then were printed in Braille on white sheets
and displayed at eye level in the white-walled gallery, giving it the
appearance at first glance of being empty. (Of course, soon after we installed
those sheets we had a sweaty dance party in the gallery and they all buckled
from the humidity. The floor too was a disaster, scuffed and dirtied by the
dancers). At that time, as I do now, I also thought it was important to stress
that that gallery was a space of potential that generated the future as much as
the past.
So with Instances
in mind I feel obligated to stress that my account of the last decade will be
partial, selective and subjective, especially since I have ten minutes to sum
it all up. And in the course of doing so I won’t be able to name all the staff,
board members, volunteers and community members who have made Modern Fuel such
a special place. Instead I’ll have to cut to the chase: The single most
important decision and outcome in that time, I think, has been the move to the
Tett Centre, for better or for worse. Many of us who were involved with the
decision and planning for it left town before it happened, so we didn’t have to
deal with the consequences. But I do think that we made the right decision, not
merely for the improvements to its infrastructure and most importantly its
accessibility, but also because I think that in order for Modern Fuel to move
forward it had to move. It was literally
stuck in the same place for over thirty years and its location was increasingly
becoming a liability for the organization.
The move to the Tett is linked in my mind to a term that had
great currency in artist-run culture at the time and probably still does: Professionalization.
This word was often met with distrust if not hostility, but I don’t believe
that it is a bad thing. I’ve been trying to become a professional my entire
life and I’m still not there yet. And we have certainly made some advances in
terms of professionalizing the gallery in the past few years, with additional
staff positions, salaries and benefits. Of course the mandate of the gallery is
the professional development of emerging artists (and you could also say
curators). I sometimes wonder how long it can take for an artist to emerge. What
I mean to say is that “professionalization” should be understood as an ongoing
process. Indeed, it often felt like we were just making it up as we were going
along.
I like to recall how the first cast members of the
television show Saturday Night Live were called the Not Ready for Prime Time
Players. The phrase suggested that there was an element of danger, or risk and
uncertainty in their performances. It still retains a sense of the unaccomplished,
of the yet to be accomplished, which I think is applicable to Modern Fuel.
This is not to say that Modern Fuel hasn’t accomplished some
great things. We’ve had too many excellent exhibitions over the years to
mention here, with many of the artists going on win or be nominated for the
Sobey Awards or the Polaris awards (and some of them from previous decades have
gone on to win Governor General’s Awards). [Catch ’em first at Modern Fuel folks,
that’s my tip for you today.] For me the really memorable occasions are the ones
where we collaborated with the community to make something happen, such as the
time that we screened videos documenting the social practice of the Cuban
artist René Francisco during the harvest celebration in what was then called
the FRILL community garden (Friends Revitalizing Industrial Lands Lovingly)
adjacent to the No Frills grocery store that was in the Swamp Ward
neighbourhood (2008); or when Adrian Stimson in the guise of Buffalo Boy,
wearing fishnet stockings, rode a coin-operated horse through the streets of
Kingston in the Pride Parade in 2008. We’ve had so many successful and
impactful collaborations with so many organizations: the Multicultural Arts Festival
and the Film Festival and Cubafest. I haven’t even mentioned the Agnes and the
Union Gallery. When we presented a series of Indigenous performance art called Acting
Out, Claiming Space in 2011 we probably had our longest list of collaborators
and sponsors for an event yet. This took place right after the repairs to damages
from a second floor flood had been completed and the walls and the floor in the
gallery had never looked better. Of course, right then the artist Jordan
Bennett chose to present a durational skateboarding performance in the gallery,
placing the floors in peril once again. Such is the way it goes. I just wanted
to mention that Board Member Carla Taunton was instrumental to connecting us
with many of the Indigenous artists and curators that we worked with over this
time. One of my favourite memories is of
the Voice Off workshops that we ran in 2009, where Indigenous video artists
worked with youth at the Katarokwi Native Friendship Centre to produce videos
which we screened in Market Square for one of the Art After Dark gallery crawls.
And another outstanding event was a performance that was
part of an exhibition titled I Can Only
Make It Up Once by the Kingston artist Lisa Figge. It was one of the last
exhibitions at the gallery while I was still here. Exploring disability as a
location of knowledge, Figge makes artworks in order to renegotiate the terms
of living in a body that is no longer able-bodied. In a moving and powerful
performance, Figge traversed the two flights of stairs that were necessary to
get into the old Modern Fuel, flights of stairs which had curtailed her
involvement with the gallery. I have looked at spaces in terms of their
accessibility ever since.
Finally, I wanted to say that working at Modern Fuel was a
very rewarding time for me and I am grateful that I had the opportunity to be
involved and be one of the many who have overseen this great project since its
inception in 1977. I am heartened to see some of the initiatives I undertook as
Artistic Director continuing to this day, such as the Vapours experimental music
concerts, the Syphon newspaper, Square Pegs video art screenings, and even Your
Own Grad School. (The Your Own Grad School proposal was a submission that was turned
down by the selection committee (perhaps because it was too nebulous) but I
brought it forward as a personal project.) It was hard to know what would come
of it, but that is the nature of the unanticipated or the untested. This
reminds me of the time in 2007 that the artist Jess MacCormack totally changed at
the last minute the project she did in Kingston from the one that she had proposed.
It was okay though because the new and unexpected project was better: in a
residency with Modern Fuel Artist Run Centre at The Artel, she worked on an art
project with the women in The Isabel MacNeil House (the only low security
federal prison for women in Canada) that resulted in an animated film. I’m
still astounded by this achievement. We wouldn’t have been able to do it
without the Artel, where MacCormack was in residence for a month and where her
exhibition was held.
Unfortunately there is no time to outline the vibrant and
brief history of The Artel arts residence that was launched with Modern Fuel’s
support during this time, but I did want to mention one of the Artel’s founding
residents, Lisa Visser, who sadly passed away, much too young, in 2013. Lisa
was the kind of artist (and curator) – critical, courageous and kind – that
Modern Fuel needs, and of course she was involved. If people like her continue
to be involved, Modern Fuel will remain relevant and alive, open to new ideas,
new directions, the unknown, and the yet to be accomplished.
