Alt-Arts

Parker Kay aka Pumice Raft

Shannon Garden-Smith, The minor time of nilling, 2019, installation view, ...5,1,4,1,3—Done!, 2019-2020. Image courtesy of Alex Willms and Pumice Raft.

On a Thursday evening, I make my way to Parker Kay’s home as a summer storm descends on Toronto and lightning branches across the sky. We sit at the table covered with coils of cords and a pair of microphones. I cannot help but check out the bookshelf behind Kay filled with stacks of paperbacks, a snake plant, and rocks with smoothed edges from Leslie Street Spit. Kay warns me there is a little feedback as I adjust the headphones.

“You don’t just let the interview happen. You record it. You archive it. And then it becomes history,” Kay says while pouring us water. “I’m not interested in history as a linear straight line. History is interesting because it’s based in a myth. We have the capacity to control how things are being seen.” And, so, Kay presses record and will later archive our conversation. Kay documents with a rigor, professionalism, and enjoyment that makes me believe there is a well-organized folder with many, many more archived moments. For instance, when the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Toronto declined to record the panel discussion “Alternative Gallery Models and Community Building” — organized by artist Patrick Cruz in May 2023 — Kay not only participated along with three fellow founders of artist-run spaces but also recorded the evening himself.

Kay credits legendary Canadian art collective General Idea — Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal, and AA Bronson — with pioneering this strategy of self-archiving and mythologizing. In 2013, when he was a student acquainting himself with Toronto and its art spaces, Kay worked at Art Metropole, the nonprofit center focused on artists books founded by General Idea in 1974. Pumice Raft, Kay’s nonprofit arts organization, shares with General Idea’s various projects an interest in self-mythologizing and commitment to close collaboration and DIY self-publishing.

When I ask about Kay’s role in Pumice Raft, he tells me, “I think the title that feels most appropriate for me is to consider Pumice Raft as an alter ego. This appeal of the alter ego is to refuse the professionalization of small spaces and nurture the personal nature of curatorial work.” He explains that a pumice raft is “an ecological phenomenon that usually follows an underwater volcanic eruption.” Pumice is a volcanic rock capable of floating, and occasionally a critical mass of pumice will form a particulate island stable enough to ferry flora and fauna to distant shores. It is an object that, as Kay puts it, “is both a single entity and one which is made of many elements. It is permeable while also having distinct boundaries. This allows for collaborators to come and go while having some sense of continuity through my ongoing involvement.” One of Pumice Raft’s ongoing collaborators is artist Lili Huston-Herterich. Kay and Huston-Herterich met while working at Art Metropole in those early days, and she says, “Parker and my friendship and working relationship are entangled— our collaboration history closely follows our personal history as friends.”

sarah koekkoek and Denise Solleza performing as part of Foray (October 23, 2022) an event in collaboration with The Mycological Society of Toronto. This event was part of the Implicit Choreographies & Relational Topographies program, organized in collaboration with Chris Mendoza. Image courtesy of Clea Christakos-Gee and Pumice Raft, 2022.

Pumice Raft first appeared as an Instagram account in 2016. Kay used this platform to share experimental writing, which ranged from exhibition texts for peers to responses to United States land artists Richard Serra and Robert Smithson and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. If you scroll to the beginning of Pumice Raft’s feed, you can still find these posts, and they point to Kay’s core principles of ecological awareness, social engagement, and political mindedness.

In September 2017, Brent Cehan, the Art Department Librarian at the Toronto Reference Library, invited Kay to organize a lecture series. Earlier that year, Kay’s site-specific installation and panel discussion Struggles with Images, part of the Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival, had drawn new audiences to the institution. Kay saw the lecture series as an opportunity to work under the name Pumice Raft and articulate his curatorial perspective. While he admits he was nervous cold-calling potential speakers, he persisted in gathering what he describes as a “cross-boundary, cross-industry, cross-sector look at overarching similarities” on art, architecture, and culture. Kay brought together ten guest speakers — filmmakers, architects, publishers, authors, and artist-run center directors — for conversations on the “Intersections of Cinema and Architecture,” “Toronto’s Psychogeography, Spaces, and Places,” and “The Evolution of the Artist-Run Centre.”

Kay knew he wanted Pumice Raft to be an officially recognized entity, so on December 20, 2018, he made the move to incorporate it federally as a nonprofit organization under the name “CER: The Centre for Experiential Research.” This was a decisive move away from becoming a commercial gallery, which in Kay’s view is a moral choice. Reflecting on this decision, Kay says, “I always had an interest in the history of nonprofit arts organizations in Canada. And also observed that this path isn’t really attempted.” He identifies Whippersnapper Gallery at the edge of Kensington Market as one, if not the only, artist-initiated organization in Toronto to take this route of formally registering in recent history. While he is critical of nonprofit arts organizations — particularly of what artist-run centers have become — he still values their non-capitalist ways of working as vital and political for the arts and says, “I’m interested to see what else it could be.”

For much of the following year, Kay continued this mode of cross-discipline collaboration, partnering with established organizations and drifting about the city with no intention or desire to have a permanent physical location. During this period, Kay worked with Jane’s Walk Toronto, the Ontario Associations of Architects, and the now-closed Scrap Metal Gallery and The Loon, among others. Yet, when a friend was leaving their space and the opportunity to take the lease presented itself, Kay thought “I’ve always wanted to do this. Let’s just do it!”

Ellen Schwartzel (president, Toronto Field Naturalists) as part of How to See in Plain Sight (July 9, 2022) a guided tour of the plant ecologies in the Todmorden Mills nature preserve. This event was part of the Implicit Choreographies & Relational Topographies program, organized in collaboration with Chris Mendoza. Image courtesy of Ben Freedman and Pumice Raft, 2022.

Kay signed the lease for unit 103 at 348 Ryding Avenue on November 1, 2019. Previously, Cassandra Cassandra and Carl Louie had split the space — an arrangement inspired by Franz Kaka and Towards Gallery, who were similarly alternately inhabiting a gallery space elsewhere in the city. For two years, Pumice Raft and Cassandra Cassandra took turns in the eighteen-by-fourteen foot room. This cushioned Pumice Raft from the pressure to program constantly and to cover high rent expenses. Sharing the space provided what Kay calls a “soft landing.”

“When we left, we were overjoyed that Parker was able to take over full time,” says Elsa Delage and Christian Siroyt, who run Cassandra Cassandra. “We love knowing that the space is full of [Pumice Raft’s] passion and commitment to this day.”

In this small, inherited room with tiled floor and a single large window running perpendicular to the entrance, Kay added gallery-based exhibitions to Pumice Raft’s repertoire. Kay’s installations are notably thoughtful in their orchestration, evincing a special attentiveness to artists and architecture. All surfaces are considered: walls are often painted colors other than the typical gallery white, and the space is often transformed with exhibition-specific constructions. Since Kay spent his twenties doing installation work for museums and galleries, he undertakes this process himself with the odd hired helping hand from a “roving cast” of installers.

In 2020, a mutual friend introduced Kay to Manuel Da Costa, a frame maker who specializes in contemporary frames that draw on historical practices and techniques. The following year, Da Costa provided the framing for Michael Freeman Badour’s solo exhibition A Few Steps Away — and so began another long-term collaborative friendship. Da Costa hopes his work with Pumice Raft shows “that you don’t always have to follow the classic mantra where ‘the frame should not detour the eye from the art.’ I believe that because the frame is a vital part of the package, there are endless presentations one can dive into to elevate the work.”

Stephane Gaulin Brown, A Coincident Other, 2022, installation view, Toil, and a Peaceful Life, 2022. Image courtesy of Pumice Raft, 2022.

While Kay continues to curate gallery exhibitions, he also has a prolific publishing practice and creates arts programming around the city. These facets of Pumice Raft are so diverse and intricate, it is impossible to explain all of it. This range of output is indicative of Kay’s belief that art happens. “It’s not a preexisting thing. There are objects that are good catalysts, like a painting, but art also happens during a lecture, or a walk. And I ran into this a few times with events,” he says. “The conversation, the place, the setting all culminates and swirls together and there’s an affect. That is where art happens.”

In order to protect Pumice Raft’s longevity and to justify his urge to renovate the second-floor unit, Kay signed a three-year lease renewal in November 2022. While he feels all the usual struggles of a small non- profit arts organization trying to operate, Kay is making specific plans — such as receiving a charitable status designation from the Canada Revenue Agency — to alleviate some of these. Charitable status will enable Pumice Raft to provide tax-deductible donation receipts, something not possible with its current nonprofit status. Kay’s desire to facilitate reciprocal relationships with supporters is another means of sustaining Pumice Raft.

Artist Unknown, Untitled (house) & Michelle Homonylo, My Grey House, 2018-2023, installation view, From the Attic to the Cellar, 2023. Courtesy of Pumice Raft.

“The spirit of collaboration runs through all of Parker’s work,” says artist-poet Cason Sharpe, who met Kay while working at Art Metropole during Kay’s tenure on the board and who currently collaborates with Pumice Raft on a reading series. “It often feels impossible as an artist to find an institution, even a small-scale one, that’s so willing to put its resources and support behind you unequivocally, with no hidden agenda or ulterior motive. Pumice Raft collaborates with artists in a way that feels genuinely reciprocal, and I’m grateful to be part of that.”

Pumice Raft may be a single entity, yet Kay nurtures a web of collaborators that flows across disciplines and time. “How do I make these relationships beneficial both ways beyond a project?” asks Kay. After telling me about the next group exhibition, Exuberance!, he presses the record button to conclude our conversation. And then he begins recording again as we chat about my work, returning the attention.

Parker Kay aka Pumice Raft

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