James North Art Crawl: February

This blog entry owes something of a debt to the cold medication that’s been working to keep me relatively lucid through the better part of this week as well as the weekend’s ragged aftermath of having attended the Art Crawl in this condition. I probably would have given this month’s Crawl a pass, save for the fact that I’ve already missed the two months previous; also, this month signaled the revival of the New Harbours Music Series at Christ’s Church Cathedral, an event that has not only offered uniquely transformative acts in past incarnations, but also involves long periods of sitting, for which my weak and wobbly self was most grateful.

First up (after something of a prolonged wait) was 2x the Mono - in conversation, you can refer to him as ‘Two Times the Mono.’ His set kicked off with a soothing sort of pre-arranged composition with looping vocals before transitioning into a live improvisation that, in highly precise aural terms, I would describe as ‘wet’ in the early passages before things took off in a flurry of sound and tempo. While some of the shifts in pacing made for rough listening, the balance of strange choral and organ effects made for a good atmospheric use of the space.

His last piece of the evening, ‘The Robot Folk Song’ was preceded by a swap of headgear to the plush dinosaur hat pictured above and a hilarious deadpan explanation of his prescient vision for the inevitable takeover of the world by cell-phone robots. Given that sort of build-up, I wish the song itself had contained at least some portion of that paranoia and humour; instead, we received a folksy and toothless lament about popular technology in general, and I was met with the grim horror of realizing that I had finally encountered an act of art about robots that I actually didn’t like.

Thankfully, the rest of the evening offered many means of restoring my belief in the awesomeness of robots, starting with the second performer at the Cathedral. Unfortunately, I can’t find a reliable record of the gentleman’s name at the moment (I’ll be back to edit this blog once I’m properly up and about again), but my semi-coherent notes tell me his name is Dave or David. Anyway, David and his guitar was accompanied by two of my favourite things: a MacBook and a robot that, while somewhat dysfunctional, provided an oddly compelling visual element to the musical performance. David’s piece, ‘Emergence,’ was produced in collaboration with four writers and consequentially has an uncanny narrative vibe thrumming away somewhere underneath all those strains of gritty, post-industrial sound - the babble of human traffic, a lonely bell at an abandoned railway crossing. His certainly isn’t the first harsh and heavy piece I’ve seen performed in the cathedral, but in some ways it was the first to have subverted the mood of the setting rather than being consumed by its grand sacred scale; ‘Emergence’ is more a shifty, nebulous noir compared to this performance space, dark and smoldering like the scrape of matches being struck in a smoky underground pub.

Bryce Huffman @ Loose Canon

For a different shade of dark, and a brighter affirmation of my robot love, Loose Canon has brought back a trio of artists from last year’s programming for The Variety Show. Peter Yuill and Bryce Huffman are ridiculously well-suited to show together given their mutual playfulness with twentieth century history and vintage advertisements, while Miles Pasick achieves a more sobering take on similar content with his relatively sparse drawings. His work isn’t without humour - Pretty Boys Fuck Like Rabbits is especially cute - but it’s hard to hold up against the spectacle of a gunslinger robot in a sombrero.

Alanna Young @ Show and Tell Gallery

Jocelyn Chen @ Show and Tell Gallery

For a collaboration that manages to be both sober and seamless, Show and Tell Gallery has shown its usual knack for artist pairings by presenting Alanna Young and Jocelyn Chen together in what will be the collective’s last appearance on the Art Crawl; Show and Tell will be leaving the space at the end of the month, but there should be two more Friday openings to look forward to until then. Perhaps in awareness of this finite opportunity, the space was more densely packed than usual - quite the feat when both artists are engaged in seemingly fragile and unassuming paper-based practices. The scale and quantity of their efforts are tempered by a sensitivity to the textural quality of their medium, such that these handmade papers are presented as sculptural objects rather than surfaces for some other purpose. That being said, Chen and Young have mutually pushed into a more layered treatment of paper in a series of collaborative pieces that were easily the highlight of their exhibition.

Sadko Hadzihasanovic @ The Print Studio

With apologies for a truly second-rate snapshot of the work, Sadko Hadzihasanovic’s series of painted interventions at The Print Studio read like droll visual jokes and jabs at the expense of communist chic and art history; the above work with the subtitle ‘How to explain Henry Moore to Che’ is a brilliant example. Even with the tongue-in-cheekiness of the sun-bleached, nostalgic source images, there remains a serious-minded undercurrent in the work’s coy conflation of Eastern European and Cuban histories and tourisms.

Also at the Print Studio that night was a looped video projection by yet another artist whose name has gracelessly disappeared in my sinus-congested stupor - apologies again, especially as it was an effective and ideal projection in the context of an art crawl: visually compelling without demanding an excess of prolonged time. The inclusion of video at the Print Studio marks an interesting transition in the space’s identity given the on-going development of a new Digital Design facility on the premises, a move which may reinvigorate and expand the practice of printmaking in this centre and beyond.

Carl Brown, Separate Realities, 2009

Some understanding of how the medium of video and print might converge could be gleaned from Carl Brown’s exhibition Visual Alchemy/Ocular Alkahest at Hamilton Artists Inc. The excess of photographic and painterly works on display in the gallery reflect Brown’s practice as a maker of hand-manipulated film and represent a highly-charged collision of mechanical and manual acts of artistic production. More of the machine than the man is apparent in the myriad digital prints, arranged as visual cues of some as-yet-unknown narrative; the abstractions of his enlarged film strip paintings move in the other direction, murky with physical matter.

This exhibition is also accompanied by an artist’s talk and a film screening of Brown’s Two Pictures and Blue Monet on Monday March 2, 7pm at Christ’s Church Cathedral - you can scroll back up to the beginning to see what that space looks like while I go pop some more DayQuil.

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