Modern Fuel

Artist-Run Centre since 1977 // Exhibiting Contemporary Art // Kingston, Ontario modernfuel.org

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Drawing influence from post apocalyptic folklore and Western survivalist culture, Marcon’s practice examines the irrational fears, macho fantasies and general overkill that increasingly populate narratives of late Capitalism.

TEOTWAYKI focuses on the physical and textual language of shelters. The cabin in the woods, the bomb shelter, and the “When the Shit Hits The Fan” retreat symbolize both the hyperbole and paranoia that exists on the fringes of Western societies, while at the same time symbolizing the cultural and intellectual bankruptcy at the core of our postindustrial, postmodern world order.

Mike Marcon lives and works in Windsor, Ontario. He received his MFA from the University of Windsor in 2015. His work has been shown across Canada; including galleries at the Sculpture Society of Canada (Toronto), Arnica, Artist-Run-Centre (Kamloops), Centre d’exposition de Rouyn-Noranda (Rouyn-Noranda QC), and the Art Gallery of Windsor (Windsor).

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Modern Fuel is pleased to present Stéfy McKnight's work Traces in our Window Space. This is a co-presentation with LandMarks2017/Repères2017, and be sure not to miss McKnight's work at Malloytown landing, Thousand Islands National Park, from June 16 to 18, 2017!

Traces is a performance that embodies acts of self-reflection, acknowledgement, and responsibility to the land. The performance and its remnants are exhibited in disparate locations, and in turn waver between being both invasive and reasonably unintrusive. By tracing the lifeline scars of the emerald ash borer through charcoal transfers, I am completing my own survey of infected trees at Mallorytown Landing, while also referencing connections between unreconciled histories of colonial expansion and pressing conservation issues.

Stéphanie "Stéfy" McKnight is an artist and creative practitioner currently producing in Kingston Ontario. Stéfy has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Nipissing University (North Bay, ON) and a Master’s of Cultural Studies from Queen’s University (Kingston, ON). Stéfy’s primary artistic medium is installation art in forms of site specific, video; experimental photography, performance and found objects.

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Modern Fuel is pleased to present a solo exhibition of works by Dong-Kyoon Nam in our Main Gallery from April 29 to June 3, 2017. In Recycled Sensations, Nam constructs complex structures with material drawn from outmoded or disposable electrical appliances, drawing attention to the ephemeral nature of today's digital technologies.

Born in Seoul, Korea, Dong-Kyoon Nam now works and lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Nam takes accidental events or unexpected interruptions from his ordinary life as a creative resource and turning-point, much like the lines of flight in the Deleuzian sense. He is a BFA graduate of the University of Windsor (2010) and the University of Victoria (2012) where he received his MFA in Sculpture. He had also taught Sculpture, 3D materials, and other foundation courses at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, MB in 2013-15.

His work has been shown across Canada; including galleries at the Sculpture Society of Canada (Toronto), Centre A (Vancouver), Ace Art Inc. (Winnipeg), Truck Contemporary (Calgary), Open Space (Victoria), Centre des arts actuels Skol (Montréal), and Circa Art Actuel (Montréal). Nam has recently been invited to the 35th International Symposium of Contemporary Art: Pasts in the Present, Inventing Tomorrow, by Musée d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul, QC.

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Modern Fuel is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Lise Melhorn-Boe in our Main Gallery from April 29 to June 3, 2017. RE Books are a series of artist's books which address issues of memory, experiences with love and beginning again after a set back. The books are made of left-over fabric from t-shirts, and are a play on the commonly used phrase, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Therefore each book has only three words, and each word begins with the letters 'RE.' The words are formed out of stuffed letters, which spill out of the large fabric covers. Together they will fill the State of Flux Gallery, like a maze of words.

Lise Melhorn-Boe was born in Noranda, Quebec and has studied at the University of Guelph and received her M.A. and M.F.A. degrees from Wayne State University in Detroit. Melhorn-Boe has exhibited widely across Canada and the United States, as well as in Europe and South America. She has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Sudbury, The Timmins Museum Centre, the Art Gallery of Algoma, the Emma Ciotti Gallery (Iroquois Falls), the Art Gallery of Temiskaming (Haileybury), and the Robert McLaughlin Gallery (Oshawa), among others, and has work in several public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canada Council Art Bank, National Gallery of Canada, the Tate London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her books are also in many university libraries' collections, including The University of Calgary, Queens University, Harvard Fine Arts Library, Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, Yale University Arts Library, and Duke University (Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture).

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Modern Fuel is pleased to present Dust is dancing, a three-person exhibition at Modern Fuel from March 2 to April 15 with work by Paul Kajander, Laurie Kang and Colin Miner. Dust is dancing is comprised of new works developed in conversation with the afterimage and its positioning between states of absence and presence, of the material and immaterial, where traces of movement, exchange and interaction unfold. Alongside this exhibition, articulations will take form as an artist publication, as well as a subsequent exhibition at Forest City Gallery in Spring 2017.

Paul Kajander’s work encompasses video, sculpture, ceramics, sound, performance and photography, often in mixed media installations. His work has been shown in various exhibition contexts, including the New Media Society; Vancouver, the Hammer Museum; Los Angeles, The SFU Audain Gallery; Vancouver, Daniel Faria Gallery; Toronto, the Seoul Museum of Art; Seoul, The Real DMZ Project; Cheorwon-gun, Art Sonje Center; Seoul and the Western Front; Vancouver. He recently relocated to Guelph, where he is a sessional instructor in the University of Guelph’s School of Fine Art and Music.

Laurie Kang (b.1985) works in photography, sculpture, installation and video. Recent and forthcoming exhibition sites include Franz Kaka, Toronto; Topless, New York; The Loon, Toronto; LVL3, Chicago; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw; Raster Gallery, Warsaw; Camera Austria, Graz; Parisian Laundry, Montreal; 8-11 Gallery, Toronto; and The Power Plant Gallery (Toronto). In the fall of 2016, she was the artist in residence at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. She lives and works in Toronto.

Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Colin Miner is currently based in Toronto. He completed a PhD at Western University and holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Miner’s solo exhibitions include Stride Gallery, Calgary and the McIntosh Gallery, London, Ontario. Selected group exhibitions include Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Gallery 44, Toronto, Beijing Center of Art, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, and Postdamer Platz Gallery, Germany. Recent distinctions include Canada Council Project Grant for Visual Artists, Barbara Spohr Memorial Award for the Development of Contemporary Photography, Banff Center for the Arts Thematic Residency, Gallery 44 Artist in Residence, and three-month research residency with the Macaw Project at Tambopata Research Center in the Peruvian Amazon. Miner’s art practice includes writing, artist publications, facilitating exhibitions, and the artist project Moiré.

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Modern Fuel was pleased to present Common Names, an exhibition of work by Carina Magazzeni and NO and NO (Gabriel Cheung and Katharine Vingoe-Cram) in our State of Flux Gallery from March 2 to April 15, 2017. Common Names explores forms of collage, assemblage and portraiture that address the gradual, yet precarious processes through which one's identity is formed.

Carina Magazzeni’s digital collage practice is informed by her research interests in “slowing down” as a theoretical and conceptual method to counter colonial archive violence. She is a femme settler from the Niagara Region, on Haudenosaunee and Chippewa territory, and is currently living and working in Katarokwi/Kingston as the Curatorial Assistant of Contemporary Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. She is the founder of Hatter St think tank, a research group that promotes collective wellness, solidarity and productivity through shared misery.

NO and NO (Gabriel Cheung and Katharine Vingoe-Cram) is a collaborative art practice and the extension of the artists' hypertrophied friendship. They have worked together since 2014, while attending graduate school in Kingston, and often take as a starting point the personal stories that they tell to themelves and to each other. Past work has explored collective drawing practices, particularly drawing as a mnemonic device, and the affective experiences of kinships and coexistence.

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Modern Fuel was pleased to present an exhibition of work by Jay White in our Main Gallery from January 7 to February 18, 2017.

Rocks from a streambed are carved and returned to the creek; a boulder is pushed up a mountain; unidentifiable beings trip an invisible snare and are shot by an infrared camera. Traveller brings together these ongoing and longterm engagements between Jay White and other entities that inhabit his surroundings, on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Territory in British Columbia. These intimate relationship-building and learning activities are translated into photographs and projected image sequences for the gallery. Here, they become an inquiry into museological practices of collecting and interpreting, asking: What information is lost when these activities are transferred off the land and outside of their local context? What knowledge is retained in the gallery objects, or maintained through stories told around them? How does the liveliness of an object change when it becomes ‘animated’ through image sequences?

Jay White was born in Edmonton, and considers his home to be his mother’s hometown of St. Bernards, in Ktaqamkuk / Newfoundland. White’s work has shown worldwide and his films have won various awards internationally, including Best Animated Short at the Worldwide Animation Festival, and a longlist entry for Academy Award nomination.

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Modern Fuel was pleased to present Unmapping the Last Best West, an exhibition of works by Barabara Meneley in our State of Flux from January 7 to February 18, 2017.

The works in Unmapping the Last Best West focus on cartographic representation and embodied relationships to land. Typically seen as scientific, objective, and absolute, in reality cartographic representation is anything but. A cartographer is tasked with communicating visual information, synthesizing a variety of source material to visually support the communication of a specific idea. Someone decides how some place should be represented and the cartographer makes it so. I know something about this—cartography was my profession for twenty years, and every map I drew was fiction.

A central fiction to every map is that the truth of a place—the undulating terrain, dust caught in a twist of wind, the growth of a tree, or the sound of an animal—all embodied experience, must necessarily be translated to static and two dimensional representation. My works in Unmapping the Last Best West investigate the tensions in conventional cartographic representation and explore the potential for wider expression in representing place. Maps taken from archival sources are abstracted, recomposed, abstracted, and erased to re-imagine, redefine, and restory colonial cartographic representations of land. The performance video shows the arduous labour of digging into colonial legacies in contemporary sites. These artworks inhabit the gap between the beautiful fictions of colonial imaginaries and historical and contemporary reality to offer alternate fictions of land.

Barbara Meneley is a prairie-based Canadian visual artist whose interdisciplinary site responsive work engages with the landscapes and foundations of contemporary society and culture. Her work evolves through theoretical inquiry and contemporary intermedia art---media, performance, installation, experimental cartographies, bookworks, and engaged practice.

This work has been produced through the generous support of the Saskatchewan Arts Board Independent Artists Program.

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Pae White, Genau or Never (2012-2014).

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The “Oversharing” event is inspired by Common Names. Learn more about the artists NO and NO on our Facebook page! #CommonNames #Kingston (at Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning)

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The “Oversharing” event is inspired by Common Names. Learn more about one of the artists Carina Megazzeni on our Facebook page! #CommonNames (at Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning)

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Featured Poet bill bissett is a celebrated poet who has published over 60 books. Find out more on our Facebook page! #poeticmoments #NPM17 #soundonetwo #poet (at Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning)

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Make sure you sign up for the “Oversharing” event on Saturday April 8th at 1PM, it’s going to great! #Oversharing #ModernFuel #Art #kingston (at Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning)

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We really want to thank all of the following sponsors for the upcoming event "sound one two", thank you so much! #soundonetwo (at Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning)

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Burning Iceberg will be providing audio beats this Saturday at ‘sound one two.’ Find out more on our Facebook page! #NPM17 #poeticmoments #artists #soundonetwo (at Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning)

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Another featured reader is David Bateman, an actor, playwright, visual artist, and poet. Find out more on our Facebook page! #NPM17 #poeticmoments #soundonetwo #poet (at Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning)

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One of our featured poetry readers is Armand Garnet Ruffo. Find out more about him on our Facebook page! #NPM17 #poeticmoments #soundonetwo #poet (at Tett Centre for Creativity & Learning)