The Village Canoe
Chris Battaglia
Amount Awarded $5,000
The Village Canoe is an immersive, outdoor, floating artist residency and exhibition. Structured as an expedition, the residence will take place from a 30-foot voyageur canoe, inviting through an open call up to six participants to paddle, camp, and make art along the Maine coast and/or rivers on the interior. At the culmination of the trip, artists will host a temporary, free, public, and interactive pop-up exhibition of the work produced during the residency. The show will take place outdoors in a movable bow-roof structure – the same enclosure in which the canoe will have been built.
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motional Value Auction
Adriane Herman
Amount Awarded $5,000
Designed by Experience Broker, Adriane Herman, an Emotional Value Auction is a participatory witnessed exchange grounded in reciprocity. No money changes hands; written statements of interest and desire supplant financial bids, foregrounding other metrics of value. Capitalizing on the power of witnessing to release blocks and facilitate letting go, Emotional Value Auctions will be held at affordable senior housing facilities, Bayview Heights (Portland), Fay Garman House (Peaks Island), and Westrum House (Topsham). Authentic written expression and shared vulnerability will be rewarded, with young new Mainers being paid to draw items being auctioned, providing mementos for releasers who may opt to bestow their belongings on those whose written bids who moved them most.
New System Exhibitions
Isaac Jaegerman, Franklin Ahrens, Henry Austin, Alice Jones, Hector Magaña, and Cody Stack
Amount Awarded $5,000
Portland-based artists Franklin Ahrens, Henry Austin, Isaac Jaegerman, Alice Jones, Hector Magaña, and Cody Stack have established New System Exhibitions (NSE), a 1,500 sq. ft. studio space to exhibit contemporary art by emerging artists. NSE plans to present exhibitions showcasing local and regional emerging talent. Between shows, NSE will facilitate open community critiques, public artist talks, performances, and serve as active studio space for the six founders. NSE strives to initiate creative dialogue among artists and highlight the vitality of emerging artists in a larger creative community and in the social fabric of our city and state. Support from the Kindling Fund will allow NSE to present three exhibitions in the spring of 2019, giving the organization momentum into the new year.
Maine to Dadaab
Shuab Ahmed Mahat, Daniel Quintanilla
Amount Awarded $5,000
Maine to Dadaab is a virtual reality documentary by Shuab Ahmed Mahat and Daniel Quintanilla which tells the story of Shuab’s return to Dadaab, Kenya, the world’s largest refugee camp, 15 years after his resettlement to the United States. Dadaab is home to an estimated half million refugees who live in makeshift homes, including Shuab’s mother and siblings. Unable to return to their home country because of security issues, yet unable to gain Kenyan citizenship, these refugees are stuck with no clear path forward. The film will explore Maine’s relationship to global human migration, asking audiences to consider a more nuanced narrative, one where home and family stretch across continents and movement between them is neither simple nor linear.
Maine Center for Blah Blah Blah (MCBBB)
Derek Jackson
Amount Awarded $5,000
Maine Center for Blah Blah Blah is a multi-media installation that mimics institutional structures while disrupting the systems of oppression that typically guide them. Over the course of the year, MCBBB will employ a series of murals, sculptures and performances by Hi Tiger (Derek Jackson) whose context will change depending on each institutional iteration and will be installed at 511 Congress Street in Portland, Maine. Extending from Hi Tiger’s pilot installation at the space, Maine Center for Electronic Music, MCBBB will build upon Hi Tiger’s exploration of social discourse, cultural production and community engagement.
Going For It: An Experimental Amateur Talent Show
Devon Kelley-Yurdin
Additional Collaborators Nicole Em
Amount Awarded $3,565
Going For It is an experimental amateur talent show. As an ongoing participatory performance, GFI serves as an exercise in bravery, radical vulnerability, collective joy, and community care. It is an invitation to bring attempt, curiosity, and inexperience to the center, to share hidden corners (if it feels safe), and to try new things. Through support and discussion, the event fosters a communal exchange in place of an audience/performer dynamic and builds the critical skills of courage, empathy, and witnessing (among others) that are required to create a more just and equitable world. In 2019, Going For It will deepen through wider participation, access, and research. More community performances and partnerships will culminate in the creation of a printed & digital guidebook that will act as a tool for other individuals and organizations to produce this event within their own communities.
Satellite Space
Irina Skornyakova
Amount Awarded $5,000
Satellite Space will be a small, temporary and flexible exhibition venue whose mission is to work with and expand upon the network of artists in Maine to the art world beyond. As the name suggests, the space will work as a connecting point between artists, artist spaces as well as collectives. The space will have 3 core functions: to work with existing Portland and Maine based collectives, spaces and galleries; to invite guest curators to bring new perspectives to the table; and to host seasonal shows pairing one emerging Maine artist with one national and one international artist.
Giving Voice
Hope Rovelto
Amount Awarded $5,485
Hope Rovelto will travel around Maine with her bicycle-powered screen printing studio to conduct live, on-site t-shirt printing for political causes. This is a mobile unit that she designed herself, which she can ride or drive to any community protest, rally, or other community events inside or outside. Using social media to find events, Rovelto will print shirts for causes ranging from meetings at Portland City Hall and protests at the State building in Augusta to gun control rallies at local high schools. In light of the current political climate, the midterms make 2019 a very important year to motivate people to think about the issues that affect them. The jury awarded Hope an additional $485 in travel funds to bring Giving Voice to rural communities throughout Maine.
Project Room
Jenny Brillhart
Additional Collaborators: Goody B. Wiseman
Amount Awarded $1,000 in research and development funds
Project Room is conceived as a project space offering free, 30- to 45-day residencies for artists of all kinds to experiment with ideas, play, install and show unencumbered by commercial pressure. The residency will include community engagement highlighting the work and process. We will encourage installation-based artworks, performance, video, writing, video and other experiential or ephemeral processes as a means to open doors to artists who might not otherwise have showing opportunities and/or free space to work. Research and development funds will support how to craft this experience for our community.
Chasing Light
Bianca Sturchio
Additional Collaborators: Riel Sturchio
Amount Awarded, $5,000
Chasing Light is an ongoing collaborative photography series and community engagement project. Bianca and riel use photography as a means to explore their dynamic as twin siblings and their experiences of owning queer identities and disabled bodies. Chasing Light holds space for the belief that representation, visibility, autonomy, and truth-telling can build solidarity and promote personal empowerment. The artists intend to present their work online, hold complimentary artist lectures, and encourage story-sharing in accessible LGBTQ+ friendly venues. This chapter of the project is particularly aimed at community engagement and showcasing new photographs.
The First Coast: Lubec Sound Walk
Galen Koch
Additional Collaborators, Greta Rybus, Josie Holtzman, Isaac Kestenbaum,
Amount Awarded, $5,000
The First Coast: Lubec Sound Walk is an immersive, multi-sensory, site-specific audio tour spanning 2.2 miles in Maine’s easternmost town. Led by a team of guides, the tour transports the listener through space and time, through stories of the past, present, and future. Culminating in a community event at the Lubec Brewing Company, The First Coast: Lubec Sound Walk aims to bring the year-round community together to celebrate, critique, and contemplate stories from Lubec and its residents.
A POSSIBLE PRACTICE
A CLEARING: A Maine Arts Community (Alana Dao, meg willing)
Amount Awarded: $5,000
Wild sunset. Dried-leaf breeze. Welcome to A CLEARING: a Maine arts community coordinated by Alana Dao and meg willing. Rooted in the ethos of community-supported art, A CLEARING is a creative network that values and amplifies artists underrepresented within the traditional confines of the Western, masculine-centric canon. The Kindling Fund supports this organization’s inaugural project, A POSSIBLE PRACTICE, which highlights art on the margins of dominant culture. In this site-specific art installation/open creative space, Maine-based artists will be invited to create alongside us in conversation with a theme, culminating in a retrospective artist’s book that catalogs our time together.
Bus Stop Stories
Caroline Losneck
Additional Collaborators: Kelly Sue Rioux + METRO bus riders
Amount Awarded, $5,000
Bus Stop Stories is a mobile public storytelling project that meets + engages riders right where they’re at–bus stops, shelters + on board the city’s buses. Working alongside riders to create and tell their own stories, the project culminates in an immersive tour, where the public is invited aboard a moving bus to listen to audio stories and view portraits, while stopping at temporary pop-up art/bus shelters created by riders. What if–instead of cultivating invisibility–using the city bus created a new modality for an abundance of omitted voices, ideas + narratives to be heard, celebrated + distributed? Bus Stop Stories centers the art and stories of riders to articulate and frame critical challenges and opportunities, while inserting excitement into a moving system.
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he Apohadion Film Exhibition Grant
Pat Corrigan
Additional collaborators: Greg Jamie, Jeremy Robinson
Amount Awarded, $5,000
The Kindling Fund will fund a series of film screenings and talks throughout 2019, in addition to an experimental film festival at the Apohadion Theater in Portland, Maine. The focus is on local and regional filmmakers with a special emphasis on avant-garde and non-tradition films. The Apohadion showcases the work of filmmakers and hosts them for in-person events, maximizing each screening’s impact. An open call film festival for local and regional filmmakers encourages a communal environment for further creation.