I had to wait for a break in the incessant rain before making my second trip down to Cootes Paradise to get a better (read: longer) look at The Urban Moorings Project, a presentation from Hamilton Artists Inc. and the Royal Botanical Gardens; in this case, the latter has the more comprehensive web-based explanation of the four floating sculptures on view here in the Hamilton wilds.

There’s something curiously ambiguous about encountering these sculptures from a watery divide, a brief signpost the only local explanation for their presence on Cootes Paradise. Matching artists to works is a matter of semi-educated inference, and I’m bloody grateful that three of these four works were produced by artists who also participated in TH&B this past spring, their distinct visual styles striking enough, even at this distance, for me to draw what I hope are accurate conclusions about authorship.

Steve Mazza’s piece here, for example, contains a billowing smokestack that is immediately evocative of his lovely TH&B contribution, The Factory Dreams, which is very much the free-form precursor to this containment of a factory and its pollutants in a floating glass shelter. Smog in a greenhouse, get it? Of course you do.

I was equally confident picking out Tor Lukasik-Foss’s contribution, which is easily my favourite of the four sculptures - probably because I’m a contrary nutter who, despite her appreciation for the project’s reference to the Shacktown habitations swarming this area in the first half of the twentieth century, can’t help but be impressed by the one work that manages to evolve past the housing issue by creating an object that successfully evokes a shelter while being something quite unfamiliar. There’s something wonderfully alien about this proud, vertical shape drifting in the far distance, and is easily the one I’d be most tempted to swim towards for a better look.

A process of elimination, and a bit of close reading after the fact, makes this Susan Detwiler’s sculpture, leaving the first island pictured above in the environmentalist hands of David Acheson and Noel Harding. Detwiler also evokes an agenda of stewardship in her work here, using recycled cleaning supplies to construct her Green Cleaning House as an incubator for edible plants. It’s a plenty interesting notion, but one that falls short in the context of viewing from the shoreline, conceptual concerns lost in favour of simply enjoying the bright colours of the thing itself. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the limits on understanding when splashing art out on the open water definitely bears thinking about before embarking on a project such as this.

Fortunately for Detwiler, one doesn’t need to travel far from Cootes Paradise to get a better handle on her practice. Her exhibition Feral, presently on view at the McMaster Museum of Art, has made the rounds of a few Ontario venues already - I actually came close to seeing it at the MacLaren Art Centre a few months back before Barrie’s unrelenting supply of friends, beer and Guitar Hero got in the way - but coincides especially well here in Hamilton, her urbanite investigations of wildlife providing an alternate take on the issues raised by Urban Moorings. Despite the show’s title, it becomes quickly apparent that Feral depicts nature in its most alienated aspects seen through the eyes of distant civilizing efforts, the duck blinds and camouflage shelters standing as proof that we, as humans, just don’t quite belong. Birdseed trails along the gallery floor in an attempt to mark a path, but its elegant curves are too contrived to ever be a part of nature.

Susan Detwiler, Seed Walk, 2005

Detwiler’s deployment of the man-made, particularly in the use of outdoorsy clothing and gear to create the landscape of Forest Growth, brings up issues of camp in a way that is both critically sharp and pun-inducing, though her embroideries of animal caricatures are closest to the mark in terms of their kitschy sincerity. At first confounding in the context of all this rugged wilderness, her colourful felt-applique critters make the clearest statement of Feral’s depiction of nature as perceived from the safe shoreline of urbane distance, rather than an understanding of nature itself.

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