James North Art Crawl: April

The wind, rain and fog that plagued Hamilton on Friday night proved something of a bonus by pushing many of the bodies typically drifting on the pavements into the relative warmth of exhibitions and performances, most significantly into Christ’s Church Cathedral for the first of the New Harbours Music Series from the Hamilton Artists Inc. The cathedral itself has always been actively open to visitors looking to admire the altarpieces and wood carvings - and they’re well worth the closer look - but it also makes a cracking acoustic venue for the experimental sound works on offer in this series. I was largely present for the first of that night’s performers, Orphx, whose techno-inflected composition charged the cathedral space with a constantly shifting energy - sometimes somewhat like a contemplative club night, at other passages like being inside the combative body of some rib-vaulted creature, breathing and growling with life.

Compared to that immersive experience, it would seem that God was in the details along the rest of the street that night - no exhibition in its entirely was fully up to speed, but many contained individual works that surpassed their underwhelming context in their own diminutive ways. A personal favourite of the night was Courtney Lakin’s Stitched Justice on display in Loose Canon’s Gosh Darn Cowboys group show; the crocheted gun as well as her miniature white cowboy hat are wonderfully tongue-in-cheek objects that transform and transcend a Western genre that is otherwise merely illustrated by the other artists involved.

Similarly, the stacks of small screen-printed boxes in Luis Jacob and Purnnita Kotecha’s Jam the Box proved far more engaging than the tired cardboard homage to Donald Judd (with a splash of explicit commodity-culture commentary thrown in for good measure) that otherwise dominated The Print Studio. As far as retreads of familiar conceptual tropes go, it lacked the contemporary spark of anything new, and miscalculated the current value of minimalism - and art objects as a whole - as a means of resisting commercial power besides.

The real surprise of the evening was a small exhibit of drawings and soft-toy sculptures on display in the back corner of Mixed Media. Like the cathedral, this shop is one of those non-gallery spaces that remains a galvanizing force in the James North community through advocacy that goes beyond exhibition activities, though this month’s showing is plenty equal to Mixed Media’s other inspiring efforts. Though I have a hard time believing that’s his/her real name, Burcu Okay can be forgiven the eccentricity by the sheer virtuosity with which that eccentricity is accomplished. The whimsical frieze of pigeon dolls flying against cartoonish cut-outs of clouds is a great complement to the selection of tiny drawings depicting fantastic cityscapes and strange creatures; their quirky shapes and deliberate lines bear a sideways relationship to Paul Klee and Joan Miro while also being an irrefutable part of a present-day elsewhere.

With the highlights shared among what could be seen as the Art Crawl’s more peripheral players, this month’s event is a testament to the wider communal spirit of James North, as well as its capacity to expand the reach of visual art beyond staid parameters - for that alone, it can be forgiven the occasional lapse into mediocrity.

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