After two months of passing over the James North Art Crawl, it was somewhat refreshing to return to the monthly walkabout, especially in the company of an utter neophyte of a buddy for whom this whole experience is a surreal cultural experiment, as evinced by our instant messaging prior to the event:

Jordan: i suppose i’ll have to wear pants.

Steph: nah, it’s contemporary art, pants optional.

Jordan: wicked.

Jordan: seriously, i do have to dress up at all?

Steph: um, fuck no.

Jordan:
Steph: yeah, whatever bizarre mental picture from the mooo-vies you have of cocktail dresses and cooing over priceless art over vol-au-vents, this really isn’t it.

I think it was the promise of pints after the fact that drew him out, but Jordan did respond well to the work we saw that night - which I did choose to limit to what I now perceive to be the more reliable presences on the Crawl. Our first stop was The Print Studio with an impressive installation by Libby Hague that somehow managed to balance sweeping climate change with a delicate handling of paper’s ephemeral qualities, from the massive encroaching avalanche crowding the main gallery to the naive cut-out flowers pinned to the walls. Jordan and I were far too early in the evening for the open mic component of the work, but even from outside it presented an inviting, intriguing spectacle.

Although The Print Studio is, by rights, a centre for printmaking, they seem to be racking up an impressive track record of supporting installation practices that are otherwise under-represented on the Crawl. Between this and Julio Ferrer’s presentation last November, I feel compelled to give props to Ingrid Mayrhofer for her curatorial role in these exhibitions; Libby Hague’s work at The Print Studio is but the first of a four-part series being curated by Mayrhofer in this space, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the other three play out in the coming months.

Now well established in their shiny new digs, Hamilton Artists Inc. was the next stop. Corinne Duchesne’s ‘Stories To Myself’ has been showing since early January, but her impressive mylar drawings are well worth the added attention. I’m not sure how to respond to the purported feminist agenda of the work, but given the strength of her draftsmanship and the broader strokes she is able to achieve in terms of human mortality, it’s a reading that we can do without. Loose Canon’s exhibition this month, Mirela Zdjelaric’s ‘i’klektik visulas,’ is also better appreciated at its surface; her hanging of faux-vintage photography and taxidermy is flattering to the understated features of the gallery’s restored fishmarket space, especially with the addition of understated Victorian motifs painted on the walls, but her work is clearly in the genre of design rather than conceptual practice, and ends its life strictly as visual enjoyment.

As an introduction to Hamilton’s art scene, the abbreviated Crawl did us proud; in fact, the only true low point was a mild embarrassment as Jordan and I were making our final pass out of the precincts of James North en route to the Cat and Fiddle on John and spied a gentleman in the window of The Print Studio wearing - I wince to describe it - a beret. A beret, and the sort of mad scarf that compelled Jordan to draw an unseemly comparison to Tom Baker.

Seriously, that’s a crime against art and the Doctor. And Jordan wore pants and everything.

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