In-person exhibits open at Modern Fuel later this spring

New exhibitions are in the works at Modern Fuel Artist-Run Centre. Canadian artists Logan MacDonald, Michael Amar, and Jacquelin Heichert will be exhibiting their work from Saturday Mar. 20 to Sunday, May 8, 2021.

Modern Fuel, a long-running cultural non-profit group, provides a gallery space for exhibition purposes, but also develops innovative ways to support alternative art production and diversity in the local community.

The gallery is open 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, and masks are to be worn at all times. There is also a maximum of 10 people in the full gallery space at one time, to allow for proper physical distancing, the organization said in a press release.

Details on each exhibit provided by Modern Fuel:

In the Main Gallery: ‘Eenodsha’ means ‘to hear’ by Logan MacDonald

’Eenodsha’ means ‘to hear’, by Logan MacDonald, confronts how accessing knowledge can be impacted and transformed by disability. MacDonald’s work is prompted by the question: “How do I create, when I am missing pieces?” Drawing from his own experience with degenerative hearing loss, which stems from the same hereditary line as his Mi’kmaw roots, MacDonald focuses his work on building a hand drum, and compensating in lyrical and imaginative ways where knowledge has been fragmented or inaccessible. In conjunction, MacDonald confronts this complex challenge by also pulling at the role colonialism has played in creating barriers to access Indigenous knowledge, by symbolically incorporating found fragments of a Sir John A. Macdonald bronze statue, as well as the bronze death mask of the first Prime Minister of Canada, which MacDonald inherited.

In the Window Gallery: There and not there by Michael Amar

The sculptural exhibition, There and not there by Michael Amar, opens with a different sensibility: that all living creatures exist on the same plane of consciousness as human beings. Amar’s work explores how human beings are equal to other living creatures, and if this view was seen by everyone, planet earth (our home) wouldn’t have escalated to the state it is in now.

Amar’s main sculpture piece consists of two upright forms. One is a human form and the other is a bird. They are both the same height, commanding the same physical, spiritual and psychological presence of their existence on earth. This piece pays homage to the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg peoples and their ancestral territory where Modern Fuel and the Tett Centre are situated.

In the State of Flux Gallery: Mechanisms of Choice by Jacquelin Heichert

The exhibition Mechanisms of Choice examines and highlights different aspects of choice, choosing and decision making in everyday life through a collection of books, prints and sculptural works. The pieces within this exhibition work with nostalgic decision-making game references such as fortune-tellers, game board pieces and user guides, which essentially become access points to examine the implications that choices have on our everyday lives. In these works the climatic point of the decision making game, the answer or the decision is stopped, which opens up possibilities of choosing and decision making rather than limiting the process with a resolution. In this way the works speak to a critical moment in time before a decision becomes resolved, or the time between a question and answer, and in doing so reveal the processes of consciousness and interior dialogue that surface when choosing or deciding.

The works within this exhibition expand upon and react to a modern crisis; they speak to the anxiety that may be experienced when there is a proliferation of choice for which rational factors and implicit reacting are no longer sufficient to sustain. Ultimately, the exhibition explores logic and behaviour in the context of making a decision, and through the isolation of this critical moment in time, looks at the ways in which people interact with and make sense of the world.

Visit the gallery in the Tett Center at 370 King St West, or stop by their website for details on current and upcoming shows.