I’m a bit belated on delivering a well-due commentary on McMaster’s SUMMA exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art, given that I attended the opening reception almost two weeks ago now. As it was, the opening itself was so densely packed that a second viewing seemed very much in order, if only to pay respect to the unexpected wealth of potential I was glimpsing in between the schmooze and general racket.

The exhibitions of final-year undergraduates can be uneven, somewhat terrifying affairs, especially at schools like McMaster where the School of the Arts is a small, underfunded blip on the university’s radar. I can safely say that my own SUMMA show five years ago was fabulously underwhelming (and strangely fraught with unintentionally self-destructing installations), so I was pleasantly surprised to see a significant improvement in this year’s show, Are You With Me? Clearly, operating from a position of little notice is a great enabler of innovation and risk.

Before anyone thinks I’m getting carried away with myself, I will point out that this remains a graduating exhibition like most any other - which means that concepts and ideas are still very much in the birthing stage, and it makes for messy, sometimes wince-worthy viewing. What makes it worthwhile is seeing the potential at work in the errors as much as the successes of what’s at work here. Probably the most succinct example of this phenomenon would be Alex Egberts, who has two sculptures on display under the rather unfortunate title Organic Art-Chitecture (I could also write a post about the dearth of decent titles in degree shows, but that’s another story); both are curving forms carved from stratified layers of plywood, but where one is utterly sensual and fascinating, the other somehow manages to be stunted and overwrought at the same time. Taken as a single work, however, the one shows the strengths in the other, and hopefully gives Egberts some guidance on where to take his future efforts.

Having attended a number of this group’s critique sessions this past year, some of my personal favourite achievements of this show spring directly from a comparison to works-in-progress I viewed months ago. Most notably, Ashley Toner has come a long, wonderful way since I saw a rather shy girl showing some highly didactic mosaic pieces in January. They were compressed and difficult things attempting to address some rather personalized histories of medical afflictions by the use of IV tubing as an element that was lost against the explicit weight of the mosaic portraits. Her work on show now, Cerebral Homage, presents a remarkable evolution in her practice, with the mosaic literally exploded across the wall with the IV tubing and wall painting providing the necessary link in this delicately violent shift forward.

Also encouraging are moments where artists I had previously observed making promising strides forward prove every bit as strong as they seemed in their crits. I was thrilled to see Alison Garrett’s large welded tree structure (the first photo shows the sculpture rather prominently) working exactly as her drawings had described, even with the overwhelming sound of ball-bearings raining down into the steel basin. Laura Zajacz’s contribution is deceptively simple, though My Brain Hurts is the sort of drawing that only gets better the longer one studies her imagery and draftsmanship; its quirky sense of humour is echoed in Sarah Bardwell’s I Like Animals & Animals Like Me (Scream), a series of six floral plush creatures with small buttons to produce the sounds of screams that go on just long enough to become truly unsettling. Everything about her crafting of these objects shows a canny awareness of the fine line between cuteness and horror without pushing either envelope too far. The fact that it had my viewing companion and I still arguing about its implications after we left the museum is a testament to its success.

Thing is, if his view is to be taken as gospel, this SUMMA show was positively rife with bestiality. And even if that’s not literally the case, the prospect that it could-have-been makes a far more encouraging statement about the complexity of this show than I ever would have expected. The sooner this lot move on to contribute directly to Hamilton’s art scene, the better for us all.

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