When I set out in spite of spotty weather to take in this month’s Art Crawl, it was largely on account of the fact that the night featured the last of the New Harbours series of performances at Christ’s Church Cathedral. The sudden thunderstorm certainly made an extended stay in the Cathedral an attractive prospect, and the occasional flashes of lightning seen through the stained glass added considerable melodrama to the evening’s two performances by the Fossils and Slither, neither of which lacked for verve in the first place.

Ever since April’s showing by Orphx, I’ve been finding these sound pieces increasingly musical in nature, and the Fossils’ explicit use of guitars and saxophone in a four-part jam session very much aligned their performance with punk-rock conventions. The effect isn’t without irony, but at the end of the day the erratic face-offs between the various players became increasingly discordant in an artless sort of way, producing a clash of masculine egos that I’m going to describe, using an apt phrase lifted from a BBC political serial drama I’ve been rewatching this past week, as ‘dick-swinging.’

Slither, pictured above, has half the manpower of Fossil but can easily compete for sound once a clarinet is swapped into play. Again, their mode of performance is highly improvisational and simply layers discord upon discord, albeit with a great many evocative strains. For all their potential to conjure up some fascinating soundscapes, I wish they hadn’t chosen to end on such an arbitrary note as ‘ooh, our designated half hour is up, let’s fade out now.’

Venturing out of doors and back along the path of the usual galleries proved a peculiar exercise this time around, the rain sending me through doorways I frankly don’t enter all that often. Atomica Tattoo was showing a series of drawings rendered on Etch-a-Sketch that were more remarkable for their obsessiveness than anything else but were crowd-pleasing all the same. Popular taste did seem to be the rule behind much of the work along the street, from the candy kitsch prints of Liss Platt showing alongside Andy Fabo at Hamilton Artists Inc. to Pleuntje Jellema’s digital photographic investigations of the ubiquity of Tim Horton’s in the Hamilton landscape. Literalism leaves me cold at the best of times, and Jellema’s presentation at Loose Canon has all the feel of an incomplete thought - an impression reinforced in conversation with her once my companion and myself were spotted admiring the one ambiguous print in the gallery. She really is a lovely person with good instincts, and would do better to listen to herself instead of her pushy boyfriend in future.

Strangely enough, the most satisfying experience to be had along James North that night was at The Print Studio, which is showing two exhibitions of prints from their youth programs of the last ten months. ‘Textures in My Crib’ demonstrates the results of various collaborative printmaking efforts from creation through to curation and have that un-self-conscious sincerity that I wish we saw more often in art across the board.

That youthful energy gets pretty overwhelming in the separate gallery space taken over by the results of ‘Wet Inks-Primary’ and the vast collection of prints produced by artists in grades 1-5. The space actually smells like a grade school and is almost confrontational in the sprawl of work. The real shock, however, is in how wonderful many of the block prints actually are. My viewing companion and I spent more time perusing the postcard-sized prints of various animals than we did at any other exhibition that night. The fact is, children are simply much better at capturing forms with immediacy and charm than near any adult, and some of the results are just delightfully strange. In terms of crowd-pleasing fare, it doesn’t get better, or more honest, than that.

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• BROWSE / IN Exhibitions Galleries Hamilton Art James North Art Crawl Sound Art
• « Artist employment and other rant-worthy enterprises
• » Andrew McPhail in thirds: ‘all my little failures’ at Cambridge Galleries Preston