James North Art Crawl: August

This month’s Art Crawl followed something of a bizarro-world format - not just because I actually managed to make it out for the August crawl this year, but because a variation in plans caused my standard gallery tour to flow in reverse. My traveling companion’s girlfriend happens to be the cousin of Bryce Huffman, so social niceties dictated that we start the evening with UnNatural at Loose Canon, which we typically save as our last stop of the evening.

Full disclosure: being the drinking buddy of the boyfriend of the cousin of Bryce Huffman isn’t likely to stop me from saying his work is shit. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case; if anything, Huffman’s retro-comic illustrations have sharpened up a great deal since I last saw his work at Loose Canon, and that’s not just the shiny resin surfaces talking. There’s a clean confidence in the compositions that comes from lots of practice, and in the context of this exhibition he’s pulled together a cohesive set of images that support a single strong narrative telling of some historical clash of prehistory with the 1930s with his usual dash of something futuristic.

Huffman’s work is smartly paired with the paintings of Chris Brett, who is similarly descended from a mode of illustration where coy visual puns meet casual social commentary. In Brett’s case, the verbal jokes are firmly entrenched in the sort of language that would never make sense outside the early 21st century, and are all the more bizarre for their reliance on a trendy here-and-now: case in point, Ewe Tube. Quirky one-liner though it is, the white-on-white of the image does allow for a bit of depth beyond the heavy-handed rendering of the robo-sheep in which collaged elements ghost in and out of an ambiguous negative space. What Brett manages to leave well alone in his paintings has a resonance all its own.

After a mildly unnerving post-Show and Tell phase in which a substantial chunk of its exhibition space was walled off as private studio space, James North Studio has reverted back to a single open gallery that is much better suited to the breadth and scale of Kelly Drennen’s exhibition, Rites of Passage. While each work is intimate in scale, often demanding that viewer twitch aside tiny lace curtains and lift lids off teapots to get a proper look, the sheer number of things scattered throughout the space creates its own environment, somewhere between an otherworldly grandmother’s parlour and a Barbie playhouse with so much oversaturated pink coating objects and picture frames. While there’s nothing new to be gleaned from the tried-and-tired metaphor of woman as doll, a handful of Drennen’s objects possess a certain Alice in Wonderland quality that push suggestively towards something else entirely.

I had to leave the gallery to discover the most interesting of Drennen’s sculptures sitting in the storefront window. While the sparkle-coated bird figurine was sharply reminiscent of Jim Lambie, both achieve something quite different with their sad scale and cheap materials; like Flaubert’s pathos-loaded tinsel, the failed expectation of glamour situates both pieces in a far more convincing Madame Bovary realm than any amount of pink or lace could ever hope to accomplish.

Of the various group shows to pass over You Me Gallery’s walls this past year, The Hood, The Bad and The Ugly is both the most cohesive and the most compelling. A hefty variety of conceptually driven works view Hamilton through a literal lens of social surveillance and civic unrest, ranging from conventional photographs to online databases of crime statistics to Gary Santucci’s video installation of footage captured by the Pearl Company’s security cameras (in the time I spent viewing the latter, I couldn’t help but notice that the human subjects of the footage were all women). A selection from Cees van Gemerden’s ten-year-old series of portraits, Surviving the (Dirty) Nineties, claims a certain continuity to the dire state of things in this city, but also raises interesting questions of whether that stagnancy is perpetuated by outside (read: government) forces or is self-inflicted by a stubbornly didactic perspective of Us vs. Them.

For all its simplicity, one of the most engaging elements of this exhibition is a set of HSR city maps inviting visitors to use pins to indicate where they would like to live, where they wouldn’t like to live, and where they live right now. Even though the night was young, explicit clusters of pin heads were emerging on the maps, favouring the relatively small territory of the lower city west of James Street through to Westdale, with the expansive suburban sprawl of the escarpment (where I presently live, though not entirely by choice) left largely unpricked.

Audience participation proved a good strategy for engaging a heat-fatigued crowd, an exercise that took on a more youthful sense of play at Hamilton Artist Inc. with WABAM! This highly varied installation from the Hamilton Youth Arts Network was dominated by a graffiti wall of sorts that stretched the full length of the gallery. As is frequently the case with such open-ended drawing parties, the painfully juvenile blends seamlessly with delightfully bizarre visual slapstick and one especially well-rendered blue squid, though I can’t help but wonder at the cultural life of a contemporary youth whose musical referents remain firmly entrenched in The Beatles and Pink Floyd. I always suspected that most popular music today really sucks, but didn’t realize that even today’s kids can’t be bothered with it.

Equally well suited to the languid mood of August was Alex Gorodskoy’s Let’s Agree to Disagree at Mixed Media. As befits an art college student with the summer off, his collection of paintings and drawings are idle observations laid down in languid watercolours and impulsive ballpoint pen. The accumulation of these easy efforts makes for a wide-ranging collection of images in which a handful - the above painting, as well as an intensely worked drawing of an HSR transfer slip - truly shine through. Having somehow mustered the patience despite the blistering heat to read the long-winded defiance of his artist statement, I can’t help but wonder if Gorodskoy protests too much of his refusal of conceptual intentionality, but there’s no denying that this body of work presents quintessential easy-summer work for ideal August viewing.

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