Before 2005, it was somewhat inconceivable to think that the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) would ever be considered a red-hot nighttime destination, and yet the visionaries at the venerable museum have managed to do just that.
It’s been a decade since the inaugural FUSE, a now-ongoing evening event series that brings thousands of visitors to the VAG for cocktails, people-watching, and live music, dance, theatre, electronic arts, and “unexpected surprises” – the sum of which is barely contained within the walls of the sprawling heritage building.
On Aug. 15, the VAG will mark 10 years of FUSE with one epic night of art and celebration.
The FUSE experience is “pretty unique within the world of museums and galleries,” says Jay Dodge, artistic producer of site-specific theatre company Boca del Lupo, and one of the producers of this special anniversary edition.
“FUSE throws open the doors to the art gallery and lets the public flood in, and there’s always at least one bar, and on any given night there’s between six and 40 different artists either exhibiting or performing work in and around all of the little nooks and crannies of the galleries,” says Dodge.
“It’s an exercise in exploration, and it’s definitely very social.”
The series has bounced around between various VAG departments over the last few years, says Dodge, from marketing and outreach to public programs.
Now, its current place in the curatorial department is ideal because it’s become an important venue in the city for Vancouver artists to present newly created material, says Dodge.
“FUSE has been a lot of things over the years, and it is a lot of things still: it’s a good party, it’s a place where people come to be seen and pick up people, even, but I think more interestingly is it’s become a pretty central piece of the new performance creation ecology in Vancouver,” says Dodge, who describes the atmosphere on FUSE nights as “rambunctious.”
The tagline for the Aug. 15 edition – the biggest in its history, with more than 40 participating artists and three bars – of FUSE is "Disruption: Electronic Art takes over the Gallery."
Dodge and Boca del Lupo’s artistic director Sherry Yoon worked with the International Symposium of Electronic Arts, an annual travelling forum that Dodge describes as the “World Cup of electronic arts.”
Watch for a gigantic robotic mud ball, video projections on the Nordstrom building, drone painting and assorted installations in the Robson Square ice rink, and an array of exhibits within the gallery itself.
Many of the works explore the themes and history of glitch art and hack culture.
“[FUSE] looks back to some of the people who used to do hack culture with videotape and old Macintosh computers, to what some folks are doing on the cutting edge of it today,” says Dodge.
All of this will unfold against the backdrop of the VAG’s current exhibitions, including Of Heaven and Earth: 500 Years of Italian Painting from Glasgow Museums, Residue: The Persistence of the Real, How Do I Fit This Ghost in My Mouth: An Exhibition by Geoffrey Farmer, Material Future: The Architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, and Beyond the Trees: Wallpapers in Dialogue with Emily Carr.
“For a lot of people, [FUSE] has become the way that they experience the exhibits in the gallery, not just performances that are a part of FUSE,” says Dodge.
“The galleries, especially the big galleries, are often seen as kind of these institutions that aren’t accessible to everybody, and I think FUSE does a great job of breaking down some of those barriers.”
• Advance tickets for FUSE are $20 (plus GST) and are available here.
