Kenneth Fletcher
Biography
Kenneth Gordon Fletcher (1954 –1978) was an artist and an active member of the Mainstreeters until June 1978, when he committed suicide at the age of 23. Ken’s surviving body of work, though small, is remembered as a sensitive development of playful idioms and the careful arrangement and collection of domestic materials like bowling pins, coffee filters and kittens. His early video experiments, such as Ken’s Coffee Spill (1975), were slow and careful observations of the world around him.
Known For & Full Filmography3 Titles
Movie - 2015, 2h 15m • as Self
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.
Movie - 1976, 2h 15m • as Self
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.
Movie - 1975, 2h 15m • as Self
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.