James North Art Crawl: September

Some may have noticed the lack of Art Crawl coverage last month, owing as many things do to the fatigue of all things art in the month of August. This being September, however, things are back in full swing and fully listed at the James North Art Crawl’s website to boot - trust me, such has not always been the case so here’s hoping they keep it up, as it really is a valuable resource for the Hamilton-based art blogger, among others.

A good number of well-established Hamilton names had work on show along the street with varying degrees of success, though I can happily recommend Matthew McInnes and Heather Simcoe at The Print Studio - their collaborative print on the occasion of these two, separate exhibitions was particularly engaging, showing the best elements of both artists’ visual strengths. However, the real stand-out showings this month are among a good many younger, emerging artists unafraid to demonstrate the process of learning their craft and producing some brilliant results along the way.

At first, I’ll admit that Lesia Mokrycke’s exhibition, A Perspective on the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 2005-2008, was simply a curiosity, bustling at the seams of a previously unused shop space and with a suspicious whiff of vanity-exhibition in the air, but the content of her show in itself is definitely a force worth reckoning with. True to the explicit title of the exhibition, Mokrycke’s work runs the gamut of art-school experience with academic drawings of historical busts and painted landscape studies with the odd bit of printmaking and sculpture thrown in for good measure. This is not a mature move but it certainly is a brave and effective one that manages to construct a legitimate narrative around a visual art education, one that renders those curious academic drawings as strange as some of her more ambiguous sculptural works - a plaster nest of toothpicks, or an obsessive curtain of hot glue stringing from the ceiling and coiling in piles on the floor. Taken altogether, the seeming naivete of the thing has a certain refreshing honesty that made her show a real highlight of the evening.

Sarah Bardwell, Progeny XX, 2008

Of a similar educational bent was Peepshow, a group show of current McMaster University art students at James North Studio. There were a good many promising things on display, one of which was Sarah Bardwell’s Progeny XX, which I describe as ‘promising’ because I love that bizarre moss-coloured woolen sphere and the knitted mushrooms sprouting out of it, but was less fond of the doilies arranged on the floor. In fact, it’s a point of morbid fascination of the car-crash variety for me personally, because I was making that exact same mistake in most of my work during my own time at Mac, throwing in Victorian patterns where they only served to distract from some pretty awesome shit. But I learned, and I reckon she will as well.

My fervent hunt for title cards attests to how much I also enjoyed Karli Strohschein’s pieces in this show, as her name ended up being attached to a good number of stand-out objects that one could almost miss, being installed as discretely as they were. The above piece is so small and packed between other wall-based works that I didn’t notice it straight away, but it’s a lovely little thing of layered papers, supposedly shot through by a 12-guage shotgun.

Another one of Strohschein’s pieces was hanging from the busily-whirring ceiling fan (it was bloody humid that night), and as a result was trembling ever so slightly. The result was remarkably unnerving, almost creature-like, especially since I’m still not entirely sure what that not-quite-a-sphere is made from. All in all, much of the work in Peepshow is lively in this uncertain way, sparking questions from a place of unfinished labour, and is frankly a thousand times more generous to the audience than the faux-modernist slap in the face happening next door at You Me Gallery with its deathly-dull monotony of black and white paint splashed out under a pretentious title (’Riparian Dark’, if you’re wondering) that are all smug without a hint of a smirk. If showing work like that is the privilege extended to well-established gallery owners, I can only be grateful that younger, more uncertain forces are slowly making their way onto the street.

What makes Loose Canon so exceptional in this regard is Dane Pedersen’s open acceptance of his own inexperience, and willingness to play within those perimeters if it’ll make for good public engagement. There was no formal exhibition as such in the gallery this month, which was transformed into an impromptu animation studio of the crudest sort, with storyboards and remainder drawings and charcoal dust lingering around a single pristine flatscreen monitor showing the results of the past week’s labours. The animations and their stories were simple but stuffed to the brim with evocative moments, many of those due to the use of charcoal as the medium of choice for rendering and erasing each subsequent stage of improvised movement, often leaving darkly smudged spaces available in their turn for manipulation. Dane giddily admitted, on behalf of himself and his collaborators, to not having a clue as to what they were doing, that they simply had to learn what worked and what didn’t as they went along, and I like to think he’s a smart enough bloke to realize that this is exactly what makes the work succeed, for himself and for the countless others capable of achieving such things as this with charcoal, a computer’s default software, and a few bottles of Moosehead.

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