Wish Fountain | Hannah Doucet and Johnnie Regalado | JUNE 2022

Over the past few years I have been thinking deeply about wish fulfilment, illness and fantasy. My obsession with these intertwined themes stems from my own experience receiving a wish trip to Disney World when I was ten, granted after I finished two years of treatment for Lymphoblastic Lymphoma.

Wishes made with wish-granting agencies are "official" wishes, made within a philanthropic industry that guarantees fulfilment. I'm fascinated by the cultural complexity of the “wish,” a stated desire then realized by staff at these agencies. In this context, wish-fulfilment is aligned with corporate structures and transformed into something tangible and executable. In the formulation of wish-granting agencies, it is as if the illness has taken the place of the ritualistic wish object—the wishbone, the wishing well, the wish chip, the shooting star. The child wishes on their illness. Wish-granting agencies may appear to be fairy godmother-like, stating that a child may wish for anything. But, in reality, the wish has to be deemed achievable.

Wish fountain represents another kind of wishing, a more familiar one, one that doesn’t guarantee fulfilment, a stab in the dark, a toss into the abyss. The wish doesn’t have to be achievable, doesn't have to make sense. You wish and in this context, the act of wishing returns to you a stranger's wish. This is my favourite part: the exchange. One wish doesn't necessarily yield satisfaction, but instead, yields another, revealing an unfurling network of wish-making. I’d like to think that the randomness of it all might do away with any lingering superstitions you may have that sharing your wish makes it unlikely to come true. You aren’t speaking it aloud. You are tossing the wish into the fountain, it just turns out there is someone on the other side.

-Hannah Doucet

Hannah Doucet (she/her) is an artist, arts educator and cultural worker from Treaty 1 Territory currently based in Tkaronto. She works within photography, video and sculpture to create work about wish fulfilment, illness and fantasy. She has exhibited across Canada, with exhibitions at Neutral Ground (Regina), Duplex (Vancouver), PLATFORM (Winnipeg), The New Gallery (Calgary) and Gallery 44 (Toronto). She is one of four founders of Blinkers, a non-profit project space based in Winnipeg, where she was a co-director until August 2021.

Johnnie Regalado is a creative coder. By day he leads a team of devs for an ecommerce agency in Brooklyn. By night he dreams of weird web projects. He previously worked for over a decade in arts and non-profit as Station Manager at CFUV 101.9 FM, Board President of the National Campus & Community Radio Association and Editor of Weird Canada. He graduated from the University of Victoria with a BFA in Creative Writing and English and currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.

This project is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts

SPAM (Special Presentation Art Mail) is an email-based art series where artists work collaboratively to create a digital artwork. Through the link below, viewers can sign up to partake in the project by volunteering to receive upcoming interactive Number 3 Gallery emails.

For the most part, the only art we encounter these days arrives via digital means. You may receive emails announcing exhibitions—both online and in person (often by appointment)—and documentation of process work on your feed in lieu of studio visits or art crawls. When we consider how this changes our perception and relationship to artworks we might also reflect on how many folks have been exclusively viewing artwork this way long before our current infectious disease concerns. This said, online art can just as easily connect us as it can be ignored entirely. If we start to question whether the work we see is losing something to these platforms we might also note how art and technology are almost irreducibly connected—be it the tools we use of the visual influence it can catalyze. 

This is not a new dynamic; mail artists have long used postal technology as a way to share snippets of their progress or work, which often intentionally took the place of formal in-person exhibitions. Not unlike our current email subscriptions, mail art (an inherently collaborative medium) would enclose participatory or interactive project and publication opportunities. Given that technology is presently the lifeline to connectivity for many of us, what better time to reconnect with the spirit of the early mail and e-mail artists who used their choice method of distribution as a transfer of aesthetic information to surmount geographical and cultural boundaries. 

To view the project please contact number3gallery@gmail.com