Kenneth Fletcher

MAINSTREETERS: Taking Advantage, 1972-1982 surveys the history of a gang of Vancouver artists who lived and worked together in drama, excess, friendship and grief. From 1972 until roughly 1982, they lived along Main Street, the traditional dividing line between the city's working-class immigrant eastside and its more affluent westside. Core members––Kenneth Fletcher, Deborah Fong, Carol Hackett, Marlene MacGregor, Annastacia McDonald, Charles Rea, Jeanette Reinhardt and Paul Wong––engaged in ambitious collaborative media and performance work that charts the rapidly shifting social terrain of the city.

"The VAG exhibition space was staged with a four walled cube, 8’X 8’ which was padded internally. The four walls and the open ceiling were monitored by video cameras. Wong entered the gallery, climbed a ladder and disappeared into the blue cube. Personally I was very uneasy about the work at this time. Knowing that [Kenneth] Fletcher was a close friend of Wong’s who had only months before committed suicide. I felt perhaps Wong would attempt his own cathartic self-mutilation as we all watched. As Wong’s slow pacing and wall assaulting became more intense the audience picked up the momentum of his energies. The intensity of the performance became overpowering. Not knowing how far Wong has planned his own movements, one began to wonder if he was indeed going to bash himself into unconsciousness as some observers had predicted." - Arthur Perry, Vanguard Magazine 1979

Early colour video recorded on ½ in. Part of The Mainstreet Tapes (1976-1980) a series of autobiographic tapes documenting Wong & friends “youth & angst”. 7 day Activity – 7 days of facial treatments for acne. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the vainest of them all. 1970′s body/art. Digitally Re-Mastered & Re-Edited in 2008, the process of restoring the picture & sound elements included shortening the work from the original length of 13 minutes to 8.5 minutes.

“Early in the morning on Thursday Feb 26, 1976, a young First Nations man named Eugene Lloyd Pelly was fatally stabbed in an apartment at 4272 Watson Street, east of Main near 28th. After escaping out a window Pelly collapsed in the middle of the road and, as snow fell, succumbed to his injuries. That same morning Jeanette Reinhardt noticed Pelly’s bloody body from her window. Paul Wong, whom she was living with at the time, shot a roll of 35mm film documenting the scene – first from their window, and later at roadside. The quiet violence of the scene captivated Wong, and together with collaborator Kenneth Fletcher, the two embarked on a project to research the crime in full detail." – Allison Collins & Michael Turner, Mainstreeters: Taking Advantage 1972-1982

Wong's first colour videotape bears the influence of several artistic genres popular in the 1970s, including performance and body art. We see Kenneth Fletcher draw several millilitres of blood from his arm and inject the contents of the syringe into Paul Wong's back, just under the skin. The camera closes in on this, observing the slow response of the immune system as the skin turns red and purple. What was originally intended as a sort of ritual uniting the young men as blood brothers, with implicit reference to drug use, has become a disturbing and dangerous act, when AIDS evokes our deepest fears and anxieties.

On the occasion of his 21st birthday, Paul Wong walks southwest from his mother’s house at St. Catherines St. to the Quebec St. home of Kenneth Fletcher. Most remarkable about this video is not its careful camera work (shot entirely from a moving vehicle), but the driving that allowed for it – a feat that brings to mind the complementary (and collaborative) relationship between the shooter and the driver. On Becoming a Man was also the title of Paul’s 1995 solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada.