James North Art Crawl: April

While I had heard speculation through the week over whether Good Friday would impact attendance, this month’s Art Crawl still saw a healthy turn-out in the street and galleries, and just as well given that the range of exhibitions on offer was of a higher standard than I have seen in several months.

Elizabeth Chitty’s installation, Nature of the Body, has existed in previous incarnations before but is cleverly situated in the relative closeness of the Hamilton Artists Inc.’s future Members Space. The outward senses are delicately evoked in photographs of the artist’s daughter trailing towards an arrangement of silver bowls reflecting light from a projected heart-and-lung pictogram, creating an abbreviated analogue of the body’s dialogue with nature. While I don’t find that the bowls necessarily emulate the brain formation referred to in the exhibition essay, I was deeply impressed with the aluminum bowls themselves, which are filled with water that is difficult to perceive against their reflective inner surface. That ambiguous shift between full and empty vessels of water borders on the magical and the unexpected, and makes a telling statement about the precarious state of the planet today.

Compared to the deft handling of that installation, the Guardian photographs that greet the viewer are heavy-handed, explicit takes on environmental issues that, in their earnest urgency, recall the spirit of the times in which Chitty first emerged as a prominent figure in 1970s second-wave feminism. That level of honesty validates the work to some extent, but doesn’t quite reduce the kneejerk irreverence that seems to undermine Chitty’s intention.

Chitty’s environmentalist thesis establishes an interesting dialogue with elements of Shelley Niro’s exhibition at The Print Studio, but otherwise Warriors and Other Works is the same as it was last month. Technical difficulties prevented me from viewing Niro’s video Tree in the time I was there, but there was still some novelty to be had in Briana Palmer’s Vivarium in the Members Gallery. Her miniaturized sculptural scenes of strange aquatic life twitching from atop their steel struts have always filled me with a certain mad-scientist level of glee, and are echoed in the large prints that generate a sort of backdrop to the sculptural displays. These images transpose her biological forms into a provisional landscape, one where the transfer process of her chosen medium seems to echo the fossilized strata of an alien archaeology.

Palmer is also the Printmaking prof at McMaster, and while I’m still a bit sore over the loss of their art students’ visibility via Show and Tell Gallery, there was some consolation in seeing a representation from Palmer’s second-year Printmaking students on display in Mixed Media. Quite a few gems mixed in there, and there was a big bowl of these dumpling-shaped donut-type things that I absolutely loved - they were still warm, coated in powdered sugar, bloody fantastic.

But getting back to the art, and Show and Tell’s old haunt, I was immensely relieved to see James North Studio up and running again after last month’s closure, complete with new interior walls that have significantly reduced the square footage of the gallery (presumably given over to production space) but generated new wall-hanging possibilities. Colleen O’Reilly’s striking tile assemblage, I’m Just An Old Fashioned Girl, dominates the reconfigured entry while playing well off the brilliant colours in Jim Chambers’ photographs, Mexico: Los Colores Vivados.

Representing a small selection of the many photos Chambers took while on vacation in Mexico last month, the prints depict a vision of Mexico that is both subtly in tune to the religiosity of this present weekend and a celebratory counterpoint to the unerring portraits of violence in the troubled nation more frequently presented in recent media. By highlighting the ordinary brilliance of daily Mexican life, Chambers offers a balanced perspective that acknowledges a more complex image of a culture that is emphatically real beyond the lens of sensational news reportage.

Meanwhile, You Me Gallery is playing host to V. Jane Gordan’s Enhanced Studio class from the Dundas Valley School of Art. I still remember Gordan as a cracking good life drawing instructor going some ten years back now, and it seems she’s every bit as effective a teacher with her diverse range of mature students. I was especially impressed with the handling of colour in a fair few of the works shown, especially Gail Peck’s work (the left-hand painting on the wall above), as well as the deceptive simplicity of Katherine Sinman’s work with digital prints obscured beneath layers of painterly intervention.

I had anticipated a fair bit of levity going into Loose Canon for this year’s themed group show, God Damn Gangsters, and wasn’t the least disappointed with the first sight of the playful yellow-tape outline of an angular gangster on the pavement outside the gallery. Loose Canon remains one of the few galleries on James North to periodically engage in this sort of street-level intervention in relation to what’s happening inside the space, and it remains a sure-fire strategy for audience engagement, as evinced by the number of people stopping to have their picture taken while playing corpse inside the drawing.

Much like the last of Dane Pedersen’s themed group shows (Gosh Darn Cowboys exactly a year ago), the resulting exhibition through the door is a mixed bag of wry jokes and weak efforts lingering alongside some great moments - I was thrilled to see Courtney Lakin making a return appearance with a crochet gatling gun in the same spirit as her six-shooter last year. That, along with Luis Mora’s coy culture-play pictured above, are the highlights of this effort, successful on account of the dry humour undercutting their appropriations of too-familiar subject matter. These successes along with the boisterous colour and play happening throughout the street this month are a sure sign of spring and further proof that the art in Hamilton does tend to improve with the weather.

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