The work by Peter Kingstone and Lucie Chan in Modern Fuel’s latest exhibition Storytellings gives a voice to stories from communities that might have otherwise gone unheard. Taking up the entire gallery, Storytellings presents a major video installation by each artist, putting these stories centre-stage.

Kingstone’s 100 Stories about My Grandmother is a four-channel video installation that weaves together documentary portraits of male sex workers telling stories about their grandmothers. By presenting these stories, Kingstone subverts some expectations viewers might have about the subjects of his videos, positioning them more as individuals than types. Visitors to Modern Fuel are invited to lounge in the cozy environment created for these videos and listen to the thoughts and memories of an often marginalized community.

Chan’s video installation Yearning to See was created during a residency in Banff where she drew portraits of people that she met while asking them if there was a “personal cultural lesson” they might share. She took the “cultural lessons” that she received from the Canadians, immigrants, and international visitors she met during the residency, along with their drawn portraits, and created several animations that have a luminous and dream-like quality. The mysterious narratives of these lessons, which often deal with loss and longing, and the stillness of the searching faces in the portraits, are meant to cause the viewer to stop and wonder. Storytellings raises issues of social/cultural voyeurism at the same time that it bridges the distance between people, creating an intimate space for encounters that play with and displace assumptions.