James North Art Crawl: March

Despite last week’s obnoxiously epic snow storm, the weather took a turn for the decidedly pleasant for last night’s art crawl, drawing out the sort of large, enthusiastic crowd I’ve been longing to see on this occasion ever since I moved back to Hamilton last summer. It takes more than a stretch of galleries to make an art scene, and it’s a relief to see real evidence that there is, in fact, a large contingent of art viewers on hand in Hamilton.

That was the state of things over at Loose Canon, which was showing the work of three emerging painters from Sheridan College. Bryce Huffman, Peter Yuill and Miles Pasick are clearly popular lads given the crowd they drew out for the evening, although the technical strength and sheer fun of their work justifies the attention as well. The work of Barbara Iwanczyk and Gina Santacroce on show next door at James Buttrum & Son was similarly celebratory of all things strange and kitsch. Both artists employ a range of bricolage techniques from comic book cuttings to delicate hand-made paper collage to depict personable animals, feminine forays into fairyland and my personal favourites, robots doing battle with unicorns and muscle cars.

Granted, for a show entitled Robot Bestiality, this was the only work to actually live up to the name, but I’m not one to quibble. Much.

This predilection for second-rate cultural forms was probably most compelling presented across the road at Hamilton Artists Inc., where Moncton-based artist Mario Doucette was showing Histoires, a series of wood panel paintings depicting seemingly naïve revisions of Acadian history. Erinn Langille has written a really useful essay to accompany the exhibition that effectively sums up Doucette’s interest in a revisionist view of colonialism and the appropriation of a child-like aesthetic as part of that cultural subversion. Those points were very much in evidence back when I was part of the selections committee that reviewed his work back in October; what I wasn’t prepared for was the wealth of minor details in the way Doucette renders his scenes, all those subtle markers that remind you that, surface silliness aside, there is a dextrous and canny sensibility at work in the technique as much as in the content. He has a knack for selectively exploiting the natural wood grain of his painting surfaces, and achieves some moments of beautiful depth that are readily swept aside by the pencil ghosts of drawn figures, or else some truly unsettling smudges of black paint. Even the dotted eyes of the Justice League of America in one work depicting the superheroes laying waste to an Acadian village are masterfully rendered to give these cultural icons a vacant, disturbing emptiness that undermines the initial sense of fun in the work while keeping that humour intact.

Also visiting Hamilton from further afield were Alexis Bellavance and Nicolas Bernier from Montréal, presenting a sound performance work at The Factory. In my limited experience, this is a bit of a departure from their policy of showing video art during the crawl, and I suspect I wasn’t the only one confused by the initial lack of action in the screening room. Getting an audience to stick around for poorly-advertised live events on the crawl has always been a source of irritation on my part - and I can only imagine the annoyance of the artists themselves - but I was well rewarded for sticking around to wait for the start of Bellavance’s and Bernier’s collaboration, which did eventually draw a respectable group of spectators once the nifty noises started. audio/actes is a live improvisation of sounds generated in point-counterpoint between the two artists in an exchange that is both obscured by the profusion of laptops and electronics and made physically evident with the intervention of simple gestures like plastic wrap being dragged over a microphone. The results are sampled in small doses at the project’s website, but the entirety of the experience has more in common with a tradition of oral storytelling, somehow evoking a cinematic narrative through sounds that are both utterly strange and sometimes as familiar as the ringing of telephones and doorbells.

Between their combined sense of play and perhaps physical proximity as well, all of the spaces mentioned above contributed to a cohesive and successful art crawl, easily the best I’ve attended thus far. I would have gladly ended the evening with The Factory but duty in the form of that evening’s traveling companion compelled us to travel north of Barton to the James North Studio and You Me Gallery, both of which now seem especially isolated since the Inc.’s move into the former Jerry’s Man Shop location. The distance seemed to show in the work as well as the audience; between the on-going crafts display at James North Studio and a group exhibit of mature students from the Dundas Valley School of Art’s Advanced Studies class, there was very little in the way of innovation or interest to be had in either venue. Even the crowd in attendance up the road was lamentably staid (with the exception of a charming orange cat) and devoid of the youthful engagement happening along the rest of the crawl. My companion chalked up the issue as the difference between the wine versus beer being consumed here and there, and while I consider that the huge simplification of the non-drinker that he is, there does seem to be a valid point in there somewhere.

Regardless, the simple fact that the majority of the galleries put on one hell of a good show is a great step in the right direction. If the warm weather was indeed part of the cause, it can only get better from here.

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