Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
When Martin returned from the truck, the main lights in the Black Dot Museum of Political Art were out and Nadine was setting up the projector. A young man and woman were sitting on one of the storage benches that had been pulled out from the wall. The bench, with its simple hinged lid, reminded Martin of his childhood toy box. It was probably the time he took inspecting how the lid was made, how it functioned, that got him interested in building things, functional things. Storage units. When his mother told him to tidy up his room, all Martin needed to do was flip open his toy box, pile everything inside and close the lid. Done. That was the theory, anyway. More often than not, Martin used the toy box as a ship to sail across an ocean infested with stuffed animals, Lego, puzzles and board games strewn across his bedroom floor, and when his mother intruded with her vision of reversing the grand scheme of activities enacted, to put everything back in the toy box where it belonged, Martin screamed that he would sail away and never come back if she ever set foot in his ocean again. This threat, and others like it, did in fact stem the tide of her enthusiasm for him to tidy his room, eat his vegetables or go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Martin, as a small boy, was, to a large extent, in control.
Martin returned to the reception desk and positioned the task light over his open, spiral-bound notebook. Nadine, wondering what had happened to the light, looked over at Martin, who appeared oblivious to the idea that she might have been using the light to set up the projector.
This was only her third run through of the current exhibition, A Faded Place. More of an installation piece than a screening, it was something she’d put together when she worked at the commercial gallery, but never had a chance to properly exhibit. Her autodidactic background in art made her self-conscious about her own work, especially in the commercial context. Installations appealed to her precisely because they weren’t viable. No one bought installations. They were usually site-specific within a museum and mostly regarded as self-indulgent. Commercial galleries didn’t usually represent installation artists, which was why Nadine gravitated to the idea of transforming the gallery space into an experience. It wasn’t in the viewers mind to consider the work as a commodity that they could take home for some amount of money.
Nadine hadn’t revealed her interest in installations while employed at the Bau-Xi. It wasn’t any kind of secret, but it wasn’t something that ever came up. The Bau-Xi was one of the few galleries in Vancouver that had been designed and built from the ground up to exhibit art, mostly paintings, prints and photographs. Any time they included sculpture in the space, it required hours of deliberation. The lights had to be changed, the generally obtrusive nature of the sculpture was seen as problematic, the catalogue photographer became stressed out at the responsibility of representing the work in a two-dimensional form. More often that not, sculptors themselves were pretty relaxed about all these variables, having dealt with the issue of not being able to grasp the entirety of the work in one glance from a static position. That was what they, as the artist, liked about it, the very thing that made gallery staff uncomfortable. Gallery patrons had to navigate the piece within the space and space at the Bau-Xi was really just what was physically left over from building walls on which to hang paintings.
Never having had an opportunity to create an installation for a space other than her own overly cramped apartment, Nadine took the opportunity at the museum. When A Call To Action, the anarchist art exhibit, ended and the board members disappeared, Nadine set up submission guidelines for Stickin’ It To The Man, but until the show was ready to hang, the museum’s walls were empty.
