James North Art Crawl: May

This month’s Art Crawl got off to an earlier-than-usual start on account of my involvement in The Print Studio’s newly launched membership campaign, complete with last minute task-wrangling and free crantinis, the latter of which provided a temporary respite from the surprisingly humid weather. Not-raining was a lovely surprise, but it made sweaty work of the rest of the evening.

The Print Studio’s pre-Crawl reception coincided with the opening of Bones in Tansu, the second of Ingrid Mayrhofer’s On Surface series of exhibitions featuring Japanese artist in residence Yoshiko Shimada. I was fortunate enough to meet with Yoshiko and preview her installation in preparation for my essay on the exhibition, especially insofar as it’s the sort of work best viewed slowly and quietly and neither condition is in high supply on an Art Crawl. Each dresser drawer contains a secret contributed by anonymous visitors to previous international incarnations of the project, interpreted as obscure prints that invite an intimate reading of the sorts of histories seldom shared - narratives of family shame, sexuality and senseless violence. The sense of ages past archived in the antique wooden drawers is balanced by the opportunity for current viewers to write their own secrets for inclusion in future versions of the exhibition.

Shimada’s evolving project is also reflected in a series of new prints completed in the course of her residency at The Print Studio. Like the prints in Bones in Tansu, the content draws upon hidden personal histories - some explicitly told in the print, others left unsaid - to conjure imagery that dances between familiarity and fear to touch upon something of a universal unconscious. Masking is a prevalent metaphor in this series, be it a geisha’s makeup or a cow’s skull held protectively over the face, and the above image of a frenetic child’s drawing is particularly haunting in the context of the story being told.

Meanwhile, the Print Studio’s members’ space featured Hard Work, a group hanging of recent prints by Karli Bergsteinsson, Robert Creighton, Meena Dhar, Paula Rostrup, Hali Tsui and Tori Whyte that collectively highlighted the quality of work that happens in the studio on a daily basis. As is often the case when artists work in physical proximity each to each, there’s a certain aesthetic unity to the imagery and quality of mark-making among the six artists involved, though each possesses enough individualistic verve to hold their own in this intimate setting.

That same clean cohesion is also apparent in You Me Gallery’s current exhibition of works by Ralph Caterini, Lorne Toews and Fabio Gasbarri, three painters who share a visible classicism in their use of the medium. This traditionalist approach extends to the conservative quality of the show’s hanging as well as the serendipitous survey of painting’s three most recognizable genres - portrait, still life and landscape - represented by each of the three artists in turn.

Each painter seems to echo backward to a previous phase of art history, but of the three Lorne Toews is both the most contemporary and the most compelling, though my particular preference was for his more intimate portraits where the appropriation of Lucien Freud was less obvious than it becomes in his works posing the full figure in that too-familiar slab of meat configuration. Something of Freud’s peculiar point of view lingers in the portraits, but doesn’t overshadow the strength of Toews’ own painting style, making these smaller paintings far more convincing examples of his practice.

I won’t pretend that the densely packed showing of student work from Westdale and Highland Secondary Schools at Loose Canon wasn’t full of cringe-worthy teen art moments, but there’s also nothing validating in criticizing the work of underdeveloped artists (unless I’m directly responsible for teaching said teenagers as any number of my former Repton pupils will no doubt recall), so I’d rather narrow in upon the handful of exceptional cases. One work that grabbed me was Highland student Nell Madden’s quirky little sculpture, which could certainly do without the explicit textual cue but remains a keenly self-reflective piece of art about the condition of being a high school student, complete with tiny paper airplanes.

Another promising student artist was Aaron Aylward, also from Highland, whose painting demonstrates a commendable degree of control in his use of techniques that would turn most teenagers into madness-inducing parodies of Jackson Pollock on an especially drunk day. Combined with his somewhat enigmatic but minimally structured composition, it makes for a nice piece of work.

Given the earlier-than-usual start, I was less inclined to linger late enough to catch this month’s New Harbours performance at Christ’s Church Cathedral but chose instead to make Hamilton Artist Inc. my last stop of the night in order to give visiting Montreal artist Vida Simon a decent start on her week-long drawing performance in the gallery space.

I was braced for something exceptional, and I suppose the bizarre configuration of visitors clinging to the edge of Simon’s performance space and the safe harbour of Rachel Echenberg’s sedate video piece counts as something outside the norm. The artist, meanwhile, was folded into the far corner like an especially shy exhibit at the zoo, meaning I had to impatiently push past a hushed confusion of women and children to get a better look, which at least prompted a few other visitors to venture into the gallery proper and got Simon moving into drawing mode, not unlike watching one of Jean-Pierre Gauthier’s motion-sensitive drawing robots come to life. Strange comparison, that. Moving right along now…

With the benefit of an inquisitive audience - one of whom kept asking questions to which Simon would not vocalize a response apart from a combination of mime and delightful facial expressions - Simon proceeded to produce a ponderous sort of charcoal drawing through bodily gestures that allowed her to curl around the paper on the floor before dragging the work into her lap for the addition of a written inscription that, like her performance as a whole, was equal parts explicit statement and enigmatic ritual. The deliberate pacing and costuming of Simon’s performance generates an aura of impenetrable obscurity that masks the raw simplicity of an artist drawing for an audience, an act that is ultimately a highly accessible demystification of craft.

Vida Simon’s performance is ongoing in the Inc’s Members Space until Saturday May 16, concluded by an artist talk that night at 7pm. Rachel Echenberg will give her own artist talk earlier in the week on Wednesday May 13 at 7pm and will be performing in the gallery on Friday May 15th from 4-7pm, with further off-site performances for Thursday to be announced.

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