James North Art Crawl: March

For reasons of chronology and convenience, Loose Canon has tended to round up the latter end of my monthly art crawl coverage - it’s just where I tend to go last, and that proved a good strategy as I got to save the best for last. I’ve already had opportunity to sing the praises of Christina Sealey via my coverage of her collaborative show with Richard Oddie at the AGH for Akimblog, and I’m glad to do so again. Whereas ‘Living Spaces: Imagining Hamilton’ is a civic diary that features Hamilton as the lead character, the selection of paintings shown at Loose Canon return the focus to the human inhabitants in her sparsely rendered spaces. Many are isolated in their frames, devoid of the reassuring bustle of the city life, but are strengthened by the valorizing density of brushstrokes Sealey inevitably bestows on faces and flesh. In some cases, this figurative modeling is intensified by the quality of interior lighting in her scenes - an especially intense pink glow in a darkened room that casts neon splashes on a clavicle, or the upward glow of an endless field of too-bright grass.

Christina Sealey, Beasley Park @ Loose Canon

Taken as a whole, Christina Sealey’s show is a deft delight, full of confident skill without excess bluster. And the apparent ease of that accomplishment made the rest of this month’s crawl look ham-handed by comparison.

For starters, no more Show and Tell Gallery. In fairness, I had gone into this crawl anticipating the pang of disappointment from no longer having my dose of gutsy, energetic student art, but I had at least hoped to see some action taking its place. Yellow chairs aside, the sight of that empty space was gut-wrenchingly uncomfortable.

Diane Cizek @ You Me Gallery

Also, without the added street-level glow from the James North Studio, You Me Gallery was left in an equally uncomfortable position of isolation on that road-less-traveled north of Barton. In all honesty, I’ve already found You Me a difficult space to access - there’s a certain close-knit exclusivity about it that dates back to a Hamilton art scene before my time - but I was doubly determined to glean something positive from the current group exhibition ‘For Lent’, in which the four artists present four distinct bodies of work dealing with spirituality in a very general sense of the term.

Brian Johnston @ You Me Gallery

And I think I’m starting to get what Bryce Kanbara does with his space on a participatory level, the sort of hands-off curation that allows Walter Hickling to hang all of his paintings far above eye level so they always come as something of a surprise. Both Diane Cizek and Brian Johnston established a cohesive presence within their own spheres of influence - Cizek’s larger, brooding abstractions were especially well-considered - but these remained the exceptions among a collection of works that included some truly cringe-worthy elements.

By comparison, Socold Gallery might be well beyond my comprehension as it descends to deeper levels of surreal art-world parody every month like some elaborate game of The Emperor’s New Clothes. As I can’t determine whether that parody is intentional or not, I’ve been content to live and let live but my regular viewing companion made a special request to register his opinion regarding the work below and so I quote:

“Seriously?!?!”

And the explanation of the blackboard is, perhaps, an answer: yes, junk mail with the addressee’s name blacked out apparently is meant to be taken seriously. And I sincerely hope this really is a subversive joke.

Ordinarily, I would rely on Hamilton Artists Inc. to provide some respite from these acts of half-assery; Carl Brown certainly qualifies as a critically engaged and coherent artist, but his work was also on view at last month’s crawl, which makes any further discussion a touch redundant. That leaves the New Harbours Music Series, which did appear to mix things up this month, starting with a change in seating format. The standard cathedral formation of pews was rearranged that night in favour of a sort of theatre-in-the-round, which was both refreshingly informal and mildly frustrating as the many impressive columns in the space obstructed my view of the action.

I have to admit that the change in time to an 8:30 start got the better of me, so I missed whatever Rob Michalchuk had on offer, arriving barely in time to catch the latter part of Annie Shaw on piano. Given the avant-garde tradition of New Harbours, there was something surprising in her fairly standard recital - I’m no classical music buff but I did vaguely recognize the piece she was playing - but the soothing performance made for a pleasant moment of sanctuary. And in case I forgot the occasion, she was followed by Mark Raymond playing a combination of saxophone, plastic bags and compacts discs. Which isn’t to say he was playing the CDs in the normal sense, but rather threw them around at opportune moments. As a former sax player (high school jazz band FTW!) I can recognize that his crazy bleatings took a considerable degree of control, but on the whole I was grateful that his performance was as short as it was.

Shelley Niro, Warriors at Rest @ The Print Studio

The Print Studio did provide a comforting return to sanity (and I never thought the day would come when I’d crave sanity in art) with a solid showing of Shelley Niro’s Warriors and Other Works, the first of Ingrid Mayrhofer’s four-part cycle of exhibitions for The Print Studio, On Surface (in much the same spirit as last year’s commendable Not Etched in Stone exhibitions). The centerpiece of this show is Niro’s Warriors at Rest series of four woodblock prints; at what is essentially life-scale, the density of black ink is strangely sumptuous to admire in person. The accompanying black and white photographs of landscapes, devoid of any clear focal point, were considerably less impressive.

Paul Antic, Variations @ The Print Studio

Niro’s exhibition was accompanied this month by a veritable herd of woodblocks by studio member Paul Antic, which proved a strong graphic parallel to Niro’s essentialist renderings and provided a valuable dose of levity with their hyperactive colours and the artist’s cheerful insistence that any and all of the prints could be had for $10 a pop (I’m told we are in a recession, after all). As maddening simplistic as such scenarios can be, the spectacle did chime a much-needed enthusiastic note on an otherwise chilly night out.

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