This weekend, a new grassroots arts festival will alight on the corner of Archibald Street and North Winooski Avenue, transforming Burlington’s Old North End into a haven for experimental and contemporary art.
From 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. beginning Saturday, May 20, Plex Arts Festival will occupy Tank Recording Studio, Junktiques and the Ratsmission parking lot, featuring immersive visual art installations, live music and dance, tattoo art, sculpture, comedy and other cross-disciplinary work from nearly 90 artists based in Vermont and beyond.
The idea for Plex was born from a desire among multiple Burlington artists for a radical space dedicated to building an arts community, according to Sam Kann, a Burlington artist and lead organizer of the event.
Kann was also among the founders of Nocturne, a similar all-night arts festival that takes place each year at Middlebury College.
“I think the same thing that was true in Middlebury feels true in Burlington in that there isn’t really a clear space for up-and-coming, radical, experimental contemporary artists,” Kann said. “There is art in Burlington, but … at least for me, I couldn’t find the contemporary dance community. I couldn’t find the art film community.”
Looking to carve out a new space within Burlington’s art scene, Kann connected with other local artists and organizers including Linus Owens, Josie Bunnell, Luna Shen, Madeleine Joinnides, Olivia Sommers and Raphaella Brice, all of whom began meeting to plan the event.
“We started meeting regularly and then put a call out to artists, and were just overwhelmed with how many people were excited to participate,” Kann said.
Owens, a longtime Burlington resident and professor of sociology at Middlebury College, said the rural landscape of Vermont helped organizers hone some of the skills needed to pull Plex together.
“If you’re in a place where nothing happens, you have to learn how to make things happen,” Owens said.
Art featured at the festival will range in style and medium, from Elizabeth “Dykotomy” Rose’s visual mirror installation, “Sense of Self,” to Marcus Bretto and Mats Thureson’s “alterna-funk space rock” band, Rose Asteroid.
“One really neat thing about Plex is it’s bringing all of these different artists from completely different backgrounds who specialize in different media all together to one space,” Bretto said. “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
Shen, a Burlington artist and one of Plex’s organizers, first got involved with arts organizing when, at age 17, she helped facilitate an inter-school arts event in Beijing’s historic art district, 798艺术区.
Growing up in China between the ages of 8 and 17, Shen said that on walks past Hangzhou’s West Lake, she would often see people gathering outside to practice art.
“At 6 a.m. there would be people outside already, using calligraphy brushes with water on the ground, practicing their art, singing — during the entire day, unorganized,” Shen said. “It’s just something that happens — just a lot of retired people and young people using public space for art.”
Shen’s own art focuses on unearthing “dysphoric and persistent feelings that come from unbelonging,” conversing with themes related to “migration, the self, object-permanence and dream-states.” At Plex, she will share two sculptures, which she describes as physical meditations on her relationship to “home or unhoming.”
“I think there’s a social muscle in China and other parts of the world where public spaces are used for art-making, like dancing, performing, drawing,” Shen said. “I know, in my experience, in Burlington, there’s a desire for that type of social fabric.”
Jane Schoenbrun — the award-winning filmmaker behind productions such as “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (2021) and “Collective: Unconscious” (2016) — plans to contribute two pieces to the festival, including “Take Me With You,” a fictional video diary made in collaboration with Kann that Schoenbrun said experiments with low-fi improvisational filmmaking across distance.
Schoenbrun’s second installation features them playing a live acoustic guitar set of songs by Elliott Smith.
“I definitely feel much less experienced playing music in front of an audience than I am making movies, but Plex felt like this beautiful opportunity to be vulnerable and experiment in a new medium in a safe space,” Schoenbrun said.
The organizers of Plex have created “an outlet for experimentation and art outside of capitalism or wider commercial concerns,” Schoenbrun said. “Which, as a working artist, is something that I have a lot of appetite for.”
Ollie Quinn, a digital collage artist who will display prints inspired by dreams and drum beats, agrees. Instead of showing up to sell art, Quinn said, artists at Plex “are showing up to just inspire each other.”
The festival’s funding came from a $400 grant provided by Ward 2 and 3’s Neighborhood Planning Assembly, which offers small-scale funding for community events. Aside from a few small contributions from the organizers themselves to cover the costs of making T-shirts, Plex has no other funding sources or affiliations, according to Kann.
“I think it felt like an experiment to see if we could keep this an event run by artists, for artists without having to cater to a big sponsor,” Kann said. “We really wanted to keep Plex grounded in the community (and) inclusive of the whole community.”
While Plex attendees who are able will be asked to pay for tickets, which can be purchased online, Kann said no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
“Carving out joyful, radical, creative and experimental space is political,” she said. “That can be so threatening to people who want to maintain a status quo, often by keeping the people out who have always been kept out.”
“I think (Plex) is trying to do a lot of things,” Kann said. “It’s important and vital for artists to have a platform. That can unify a community, even as it is exploring new ideas.”
