Because I can be a bit of a plank at times, I ended up doing this month’s Art Crawl without the aid of my oft-maligned HP digital camera, and while it’s a piece of rubbish at least it takes pictures better than nothing. So, with nothing to hand, the images in this installment come courtesy of the interwebs. And Dane Pedersen at Loose Canon - thanks for ponying up with those jpegs.

Douglas Drake, Man… We’re Getting Nowhere

As it turned out, photo documentation didn’t always prove necessary, as a number of galleries were running the same shows as last month, though The Print Studio did augment Matthew McInnes and Heather Simcoe’s prints with the addition of a spoken word artist of sorts waxing poetic on the virtues of his Jamaican accent. Even from the next room, it did make for compelling listening, though by the time I was muttering the obvious rejoinders to the ‘to-ma-to, to-mah-to’ portion of his verse I realized it was time to move along.

Though I didn’t recognize it as such in the first offing, my search for images after the fact did confirm that one of the joys of the evening, Douglas Drake’s Man… We’re Getting Nowhere, was initially installed outside You Me Gallery last winter. I’m not sure if it disappeared for a time or if I’m simply unobservant, but for what it’s worth, his tandem bike gone wrong is there now, and it’s still a great conversation piece.

Sarah Bardwell, Progeny XX

This image is, in fact, from last month’s Art Crawl but I’d like to show Bardwell’s sculpture at this point because it’s still on display at James North Studio as part of the Show and Tell Gallery’s residency at that site. Not only is Progeny XX vastly improved by the omission of those doilies, but she’s also got a fantastic little piece on display in the window space in which she has custom-knitted a cozy over a rather challenging tree branch. It’s the sort of labour that really stands up under close scrutiny, as do Jocelyn Chen’s prints, which resemble Photoshop treatments from a distance but sustain a gorgeous ephemerality when examined on the level of their entirely analogue craftsmanship.

This student-driven initiative does put me in mind of Lesia Mokrycke and the former OK Food Mart space displaying her various art school efforts on last month’s crawl, an event made more peculiar by the persistence of that space on this current crawl. Word on the street is that Lesia is retaining use of this site indefinitely, and some of her works are still on view in a modest corner, though the rest is presently given over to a solo presentation of Karyn Black’s abstract paintings. An initial survey of the hang revealed some promising work, which made the experience of close scrutiny that much more disappointing. Where Bardwell and Chen are able to hold their own under a curious eye, Black’s paintings are inevitably shallow in their mark-making and use of colours - cadmium and alizarin straight from the tube do not make for visual depth, sad to say. Ironically, her painting titled Just Okay was the best of the lot, with a bleed of blue into beige working in her favour as those colours give themselves over to the suggestion of depth with greater ease and tend to forgive Black’s shortcomings as a painter.

Pawel Zablocki, Transitions (3, 5, 7)

On the topic of mystery galleries, the one showing these surprising little prints by Pawel Zablocki was well worth the random visit. My companions agreed that there usually isn’t much mileage to be found in “horse art” but these proved a wonderful exception. His horses and riders are simply yet remarkably well-rendered through a combination of canny line work and layered aquatint techniques that lend something iconic to these images - for reasons I won’t examine to closely, one of my viewing companions on this one was reminded of Plato. For my part, I’m more easily charmed by images such as the above in which grooms bathe their steeds - in water or light, it’s hard to tell for sure - and the horse is both illuminated and disintegrated as a result.

Irena Komadinic, Open Heart Surgery

I was every bit as charmed by Irina Komadinic’s exhibition, ‘The fair, frail places’ at Loose Canon Gallery, most likely because not that many years ago this was very much the type of work I was invested in making. Fortunately, Komadinic is far better at this game than I was on account of her use of craft - in this case, sewing and embroidery - as an equal player in her painting. Her surfaces are lovingly worked, though not to excess, which allows each of the painted elements to be stitched into a prominent place, as in the above image in which those hands are separate pieces from the primary surface, heightening the horror of severed bodies in her overall project.

And if it hadn’t already been sold, the above painting is one that would have finally pulled me down the path of active art collecting, my rather poor financial circumstances be damned. Komadinic can suggest a great deal of Victoriana with a few deft, intelligent touches while allowing something rough-hewn to hover beneath it all. And that fat little bird is nothing short of fantastic.

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