James North Art Crawl: June

This month’s report of the James North Art Crawl is a little more truncated and a lot more late than usual (a shame given the scarcity of blogging around here lately in the first place… I know, my bad) on account of the post-Crawl exhaustion of helping out with two separate fundraising efforts that night as well as the Akimblog post I had owing on Monday. My photo-taking capacity was also cramped by the realization that I hadn’t uploaded the last few weeks worth of puppy snapshots, and I’m too much of a sucker to delete a single picture of my Brodie.

Gratuitous Puppy (#2)

The first of my two obligations for the night was The Print Studio’s second pre-Crawl reception in support of their current membership campaign - and hey, you should totally become a member, there’s free drinks involved. And in this month’s case, there was also a great selection of work from The Print Studio’s various educational programs for local children and teens.

I openly admit to having a weakness for children’s artwork, and as is usual with The Print Studio’s annual display of its educational projects, there’s an exuberant, honest energy that tends to spring out of these works. There were a number of especially promising etchings from the Sir John A. MacDonald group of high school students, but I remain especially fond of the childrens’ block prints of various animals - a high proportion of turtles and owls, but I also really liked this sausage-deer with the peculiarly clever three-quarter turn of the head. Did I mention the free drinks that night?

After a spate of group shows these last however-many months, Robert Clark Yates has been given sole use of You Me Gallery with ‘Groups of 7: a solo group exhibition.’ Despite the tricky show title, the exhibition is exactly what it sounds like, presenting various studio experiments arranged in groups of seven works - seven landscapes, seven mappings, seven portraits of the artist’s wife, and so forth. The latter grouping, pictured above, was among the most successful of the many groups - each a uniquely observed difference in the same subject to present a cohesive, complicated view of the person with a reassuring internal rhythm. The repetition feels less significant in the other groupings, but when it works, it works rather well.

Meanwhile, Loose Canon regular David Irvine has returned to the gallery this month boasting a staggering number of new works. As opposed to his last showing of paintings on vinyl records, his new exhibition mixes things up with paintings on more conventional grounds, though his subject matter is anything but - case in point, a roasted chicken sproinged on a spring, jack-in-the-box style. Irvine has still included a good number of works on old vinyl records, but they have vastly improved from the indifferent repetition of last year’s showing, with more attention paid to the original surface and the possibilities of breaking the tondo down into more manageable compositional shapes. In practical terms, this amounts to creating comic-style panels in which quasi-fantasy characters share utterly banal thoughts while going about their business of hack-and-slashing unseen foes. It’s a far more engaging use of the surface, the humour heightened by the ability to admire that classically eighties label design from Genesis.

One exhibition I was particularly looking forward to was suckerpunch at Hamilton Artists Inc., if only because I’ve been itching to see Niki Boghossian’s crochet-knitted boxing gear in the proverbial flesh ever since her slides crossed the Selections Committee’s path over a year and a half ago. It was well worth the wait, as her sculptures have a sort of defeated slump of vulnerability that doesn’t necessarily translate into refined documentation shots, and both her boxing ring and punching bag are rich with small vignettes that extend the gender-bending narrative into a wider study of abjection. Unravelling bundles of yarn imitate bodily fluids in a playful yet somewhat disturbing fashion - the vomiting animal head was an especially cute surprise - and bring a sharp relevance to all this resurgence in knitting as art.

Boghossian’s knitted works also share a tidy relationship with the other two artists in this exhibition, from the second-skin of the balaclavas in Matthew Daylor’s series of photographs to the pendulous mass of stuffed sports socks making up Andrew McPhail’s performative sculpture not my fault!. Both artists have veered towards something less dualistic than Boghossian, something more - to use the parlance bandied about the Inc. leading up to this opening - ‘boy-heavy,’ but the excess masculinity is somewhat leavened by the mix of playful promiscuity with notions of athleticism, sacrifice and mass-market culture.

While unrelated to suckerpunch and the rest of the Hamilton Gay Pride festivities for this month, Massimo Grimaldi’s text work on the Inc.’s hoarding wall does have an open-ended hint of a relation with the theme, playing as it does with pop culture to perpetuate an ambiguous yet sultry impression of love. This piece is one of five commissioned by the Art Gallery of Hamilton as part of Turn On, their summer exhibition of contemporary Italian art, and I find this one a vast improvement on the other four by simple means of not being cloistered away in the AGH. The text activates the street in a subtle way, and is activated in turn by the people who slow and stop to take in the writing on the wall.

Rounding out the street across the intersection of James and Cannon - and a clear indicator of fine summer Art Crawl conditions - was an outdoor installation from Luis Mora, whose large paste-up images of Frida Kahlo had occupied the Inc’s hoarding for a short spell last month. Both that wall and this unoccupied storefront alcove take great advantage of the many transitional lapses in the evolving streetscape, finding more opportunities for art than what is tucked safely into the galleries. With a couple more months of warm weather ahead of us, hopefully there will be more of this sort of initiative to look forward to.

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