James North Art Crawl: May

There may have been a problem with many of the exhibitions opening at this month’s Art Crawl, and I’m not entirely sure it’s a bad problem at that - there may simply have been too much art on the walls. Not to mention too many men wearing bad hats.

For instance, this proved to be the sole negative point of Nathalie Daoust’s haunting exhibition of layered glass photographs of young women in derelict interiors. “Entre Quatre Murs” Berlin at Hamilton Artists Inc. is a prolific part of this month’s wide-spread CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival and consists of twenty-five of these identically scaled and framed images, each of which is individually engaging - some for their stunning illusion of depth, others for the discomfort triggered when that illusion is broken - but taken as a group a sense of deja-vu sets in before long. For the quantity of images on display, it remains a clever hang that isolates one of its strongest images, Johanna (2005), as the first to confront the viewer on entering the space so that it isn’t lost in the shuffle.

This excess was very much the rule rather than the exception, from Ward Shipman’s crowded cluster of painting and photography (and life drawing, for some unbeknownst reason) at Loose Canon to the overwhelming spectacle of Rocky Dobey’s installation at The Print Studio, which explodes beyond the gallery’s wall into the window and street, delivering a visual punch in the face before you’ve even arrived.

Once inside, the method behind this madness slowly reveals itself - Dobey, in collaboration with members of The Print Studio, has generated a stock of cut-out images available to the viewer to add to this growing beast of a mural. Additionally, HB pencils were left out with clear instructions to add drawn elements to the work, many of which were infinitely more charming and subversive than the primary content of this politically charged project. I caught a snapshot of my absolute favourite of the lot, perhaps by the artist’s daughter if the surname is anything to go by. The best, indeed.

It’s quite possibly an unfair charge to bring against a printmaking endeavour, but the Dobey exhibition - and at this point I speak more of the individual etchings on display in the adjoining gallery space - seemed to galvanize many of the concerns for repetition that left me lukewarm by the time I left Daoust’s show previous. Both these artists displayed a great many works, some of which were individually excellent, but were all so similar each-to-each that the overall effect is one of malaise. I remain puzzled by my reaction, since I’m normally a huge fan of repetitious labours (having once executed 198 identical drawings for an installation, I’m hardly one to talk) but both these exhibitions have actually been diminished by the quantity of their efforts; one is less impressed with the strength of a single beautiful photographic arrangement or frenetic etching when it’s flanked by so many near-identical versions of itself. In both cases, I suspect a firmer hand in selecting out particular works would have allowed these artists to make a sharper impact.

For something singularly brilliant, one need look no further than Christ’s Church Cathedral for the second of the three-part New Harbours Music Series. This month’s performance was every bit as fantastic as you would expect from the diversely seasoned awesomeness that is Michael Snow (and for those of you wondering about such things: yes, the Inc. did inform the Hamilton Spectator that an internationally-renowned Canadian artist with a career spanning a half-century, winner of the first Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts and Companion of the Order of Canada, was performing on James Street North, and yes, their response was the equivalent of a disinterested shrug), equally matched by the technical virtuosity of Matthew Boughner.

While their collaborative compositions lacked some of the site-responsive, transformative verve of last month’s performance by Orphx, Snow and Boughner more than made up for the difference with a heightened physicality in both the quality of sound and their actions inherent in the production thereof. The opening charge of sound literally made my hair stand on end for the sheer force of the vibrations it produced before moving through a more subtle range of unpredictable effects. There was a wonderfully tactile electricity at work in their performance, with Boughner generating some amazing noise in uncanny analogue to Snow’s manipulations of the Cathedral’s grand piano, hammering at the keys as well as plucking at its inner strings and drumming its wooden interior. For each of these musical sounds, Boughner would reverberate and rattle with the workings of simple objects ranging from handheld battery-operated fans to a single wire, drawing the ear’s attention to the odd character of the seemingly familiar piano itself. It’s the sort of experience that could lead a critic into transports of joy over phenomenology and the like, but to do so would disregard the performance’s basis in a sense of casual play between these two artists, both light-hearted and humble with the sort of ‘oh, what the heck’ attitude that led to two equally great encore presentations once the main piece had come to its gentle, understated finish.

The only thing capable of beating the outstanding calibre of Snow and Boughner was the sighting of two players from the Hamilton Harlots, one of the fantastic roller derby teams in the Hammer City Roller Girls league. As a supporter of cross-disciplinary practice - okay, really, I’m just a huge roller derby fan - it was great to see them out and about during the Art Crawl, no doubt promoting their season opening the following night. Further notes on roller derby and its relation to art will be pending in the next post.

FRESH / LATEST POSTS

Archives

Blogroll