PART 2

Recordings

There’s two stories I want to tell, or rather, steal.

In both cases, the mind wanders to what might have been. Let me explain:

Hillary Wood, a founding member of grunt, told me this. It was the old days, before grunt owned a space, or had regular funding. There were openings every 2 weeks, and on any given night you might find the kitchen crammed full of artists and friends, drinking late and talking loud. On this particular night, the exhibiting artist had brought her cat to the opening (as you do), an act that precipitated the toppling and subsequent jail break of a terrarium housing 2 black scorpions, which belonged to the upstairs loft tenant. One scorpion was recaptured immediately, but the other remained missing. “[T]he kitchen was packed, as usual. As there were gaps between many of the loft’s floorboards, and some larger holes where bits of the floor had broken, we spent the rest of the evening imagining the worst – that the scorpion would tumble down on someone’s head, or fall down their shirt. Or even worse, into their glass of wine! That would have been a fine panic. The party proceeded without incident, however, and the scorpion was found about a week later hiding under a carpet.”[1]

Sometimes I like to think of the way things might have been, existing, wonky twin-like, alongside the way things are. Time is a bit more elastic in this version of history and so I ask you to consider, for a moment, a scorpion in your drink.

Julia Feyrer wrote: “Half an hour after the show is over, a random viewer is staring into her refrigerator, vaguely bemused by the fact that her six-pack of beer has somehow become a two-pack of beer. Rather than work out how this might have happened, it occurs to her to wonder how in the hell the kitchen took 30 years to turn into a sculpture.”[2]

This is where things get really elastic. How do 30 years of history, exhibitions, performances, interactions, parties, arguments, meals, fundraisers and sundries make their way into a sculpture? (Hint: they don’t, not really.) But somewhere between the six-pack and the two-pack the sculpture got made, and this gallery flourished, and here all of us are.

If we are in the business of imagining, then let’s imagine that Kitchen uses time as sculptural material.  That time, like plaster, can be spread out and coaxed into new configurations, played out in the space of both perception and an exhibition. Feyrer interprets what is recorded (and what falls through cracks), making surfaces and shapes anew.

– Vanessa Kwan, November 20th, 2014

This is the second of three texts, to be released over the course of the exhibition.

Julia Feyrer: Kitchen
November 1 – December 19, 2014

For events information and updates, please visit grunt.ca