James North Art Crawl: July

For the second month running, I’ve got another paid-writing deadline conflicting with my (unpaid, obviously) Art Crawl ritual, which accounts for this repeated lateness. It also probably explains the HTML markup that keeps sneaking into the in-progress Word document of my review for Sarah Anne Johnson’s House on Fire - maybe this multi-tasking rubbish isn’t all it’s cracked up to be< /selfish whining>.

The evening kicked off at The Print Studio, where there was much sangria and a focus on TPS’s community programming represented in both exhibitions. Paradox of the Vocation showcases the results of a series of artist-run workshops held at the Juravinski Cancer Centre. Experimenting with various block-printing techniques - including one collaborative work on a hospital privacy screen - the doctors and medical staff involved in the workshop present unmitigated insights into their profession. The results are almost uncomfortably honest, passing over any dramatic narrative of the life-and-death struggles of fighting cancer in favour of revealing the frustrating impatience of waiting for results.

Continuing in the spirit of community engagement, The Print Studio’s main galleries have been turned over to the Hamilton Camera Club for a survey of their archives stretching far back into the city’s history. Seeing as the club was first formed in 1892, there’s no doubt that this exhibit provides only a glimpse of that history, which has been invigorated by the inclusion of contemporary photographs - although sometimes the reverse is true, as Mayor Fred is looking rather world-weary next to our really-quite-dapper first Mayor, Colin Campbell Ferrie.

For anyone who might have been clamouring for even more local photography after that, there was also Gary Buttrum’s sleek selection of images at Loose Canon. Guest curator Sara Knelman clearly had a substantial hand in the effort as I don’t think I’ve ever seen the space look so sombre in the last two years, but the approach works well with the arrangement of images in quiet quartets and single lines depicting views from an ambiguous car journey in brief glimpses of diminishing light and impressionistic buildings. It made for a quiet moment with images of poetic simplicity, and was something of a pleasant surprise for the night.

A surprise of a completely different sort - perhaps closer to what I would normally expect from Loose Canon - was a collection of drawings by Lenox Daley, who was gifted with use of James North Studio for her 16th birthday. Her exhibition, Subspace Portals, justifies its weirdness by claiming its characters can traverse impossible distances through subspace, and it makes for delightfully bizarre illustrations (for example: ‘This is my friend James Claus-Nesbitt if his brains were being eaten by an alien squid with rather large eyebrows’ depicts exactly what it describes: the squid really does have rather large eyebrows). Part of me felt I should have been annoyed (I sure as shit didn’t get a gallery show for my Sweet 16… then again, I was never sweet), but as often happens where teenagers are concerned, I was utterly disarmed by Daley’s wicked sense of humour and the surprising self-awareness in her ironic depictions of various manga clichés.

What was also quite striking in Lenox Daley’s wild adolescence is that she was able to conjure up a layer or two more of meaning than what I could glean from a seasoned artist like Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, whose otherwise valid message about the appropriation of native imagery as sports mascots is blunted by a visual approach that’s about as subtle as a dropping anvil. This is, ironically enough, exactly what I would expect from a 16 year old given the old Social Commentary exercise in the classroom, except that adulthood has given the work a numbing digital sheen that further alienates the viewer - I can’t help but feel the work would have benefitted from less Photoshop and more old-fashioned glue-and-scissors collage to give the final product a hint of the gravitas demanded by the subject matter.

Thankfully, Tsinhnahjinnie was but one half of the exhibition Shelley + Hulleah = Trouble at You Me Gallery, and even better that the Shelley in this case was Niro, whose small but strong selection of canoe-derived images made for a far more satisfying experience. Much like the Warriors in her recent show at The Print Studio, the above work conjures up a truly visceral darkness around the conflated pride, peace and pains associated with the Aboriginal experience. Her approach is honest, authentic and engaging for its emphasis on the personal over any set agenda.

Blue Angel Gallery seldom shows the sort of work that revs my proverbial engines, but Ihor Demydchuk proved the exception to the rule (not to mention a reinforcement of that other rule stating that I’ll automatically love anything whiffing of robots). His scrap metal sculptures, as well as his strangely elegant pedestals, are wonderfully inventive things that manage to be both vaguely futuristic and strongly evocative of a mythological past life linked to the aged quality of the raw materials themselves. Some pieces verged uncomfortably close to the ridiculous realm of adolescent male geekdom, but I found his supine sex object of a robot-chick was redeemed plenty by its title, Buns of Steel.

Things were also kept lively throughout the street on what turned out to be a rain-free evening (I always knew weather forecasters were rubbish anyway) with even more street performance than usual - guitarists, brass bands outside the barracks - as well as another outdoor installation by Luis Mora at 144 James Street North, this time joined by Monster Means. The collaboration made for a strangely cohesive moment of street art, and added considerable colour to this prominent corner on the Crawl.

Also on that corner: Shakespeare-spewing robot. That’s me done.

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