James North Art Crawl: September

No matter one’s ties to any sort of educational context, September continues to hold something in the way of new beginnings, especially after the cyclical languor of August. In that spirit, this month’s Art Crawl offered a portend of change to come with a one-night open house of the former Hotel Hamilton, currently being renovated as future creative space under the auspices of the Imperial Cotton Centre for the Arts.

The substandard photo above, of the Hotel’s stripped-down lobby, was the last I was able to eke out of my camera before the battery died for the rest of the night. Leaving aside the difficulties this presented for the fate of the rest of this post, this was a real shame in that I wasn’t able to document the many period details preserved throughout the upstairs of the building. There was something seductive and perhaps a bit unnerving about the former Hotel’s raw potential - I was enchanted by an original second-floor window overlooking a winding fire escape, far less so with being able to glimpse the lobby through the floorboards beneath my feet - though it’s too early to say how much of its character will be preserved in the completed project. Even with the cachet of period details and a central location, I can’t help but feel that the projected rents for these small rooms ($400-650 per month in the original announcement) will prove too high for most working artists in this market.

While the other much-anticipated draw for the evening was the various permutations of the Hamilton/Cuban ReMix Institute, one of the strongest showings of the night by a participating artist was Delio Delgado’s unrelated exhibition Words, Disguises and Other Things at The Print Studio. His print-based interventions are interspersed in layers of discarded city maps and architectural drawings, gestures that undercut a certain utopian expectation that is carried in the most carefully laid-out plans. The collected works are both widely evocative of western society and sharply relevant in a local context of various stakeholders that lay down designs for the shape of Hamilton’s cultural future: a game which threatens to push artists themselves to the periphery, consigned to making their mark as an afterthought.

Another highly engaging element of Delgado’s show was a series of small works sunk into the hollowed-out covers of found books. Identically grouped with their pages sealed shut, their forms imply something both sacred and inaccessible, a quiet analogue to the unbuilt church depicted in the source blueprints of other works in the exhibition.

During the opening remarks of The Print Studio’s reception for Delgado and Cuban artist Pavel Acosta, curator Ingrid Mayrhofer shared some thoughts on the strengths of the ReMix exchange (perhaps Delgado’s show was part of this project after all, if only by dint of Mayrhofer having curated both) and the remarkable capacity of Cuban artists to situate their work within an international discourse in spite of considerable economic and political barriers. Cuba’s particular brand of grassroots engagement sets a powerful example of the outward-looking gaze necessary to the successful work of art, a lesson that would be highly applicable to Hamilton’s situation as an under-discussed creative community.

The physical evidence of ReMix’s adventures in Cuba are primarily documented in both Hamilton Artists Inc. and You Me Gallery, the latter of which has taken a more revelatory, process-driven approach to displaying the works of the various artists involved in the exchange. While certain of the actions performed in Cienfuegos and Havana, as well as the collaborative deck-building project initiated by Shelley Niro and Rene Francisco in Brantford, reveal elements of an equitable exchange of ideas between cultures, the vast majority of works present surface observations of the Cuban setting with very little in the way of creative interpretation. Rather than expanding a conversation across borders, much of the work seems to pack Cuba back into a rather limiting suitcase.

The language of travel itself informs much of the work produced by ReMix, and in some instances this leads to more playful commentary on the role of the visiting artist. Sadko Hadzihasanovic produced many intriguing paintings and drawings throughout this project, of which his souvenir plates are a tongue-in-cheek example, and Colina Maxwell’s postcard greetings from Hamilton featuring pastoral cows grazing outside the steel mills render a reflective wave back to their Cuban hosts.

Gestures such as those, however, are exceptions in a larger body of works in which the participating Hamilton artists invest equal if not greater energy in documenting themselves through collective self-portraits in a variety of media that are obnoxiously insular and indulgent; given the scarcity of portraits representing the Cuban participants, they are the sort of Facebook-calibre images that depict little to nothing of the Cuban context itself. Ultimately, the sum experience of this cross-cultural return is akin to one’s uncle presenting a slideshow of his holiday snapshots in the family living room; even with the benefit of familiar faces, there is nothing in the banal archive to replicate even a part of your uncle’s enthusiasm for the moment itself.

The body of work for which I was witnessing the most enthusiastic audience response for the night wasn’t related to ReMix at all, but rather was on display at Mixed Media in both the main space of the shop and its small gallery alcove. Paul Elia’s Hamilton Strip is a relatively simple undertaking - digital drawings of local streetscapes adapted from photographs - but the images achieve a great deal by skillfully negotiating a medium that is too often used with no skill at all to depict an otherworldly imaginative space. The wide panoramas fusing together several photographs to create a single source image read as narratives to a graphic novel or a film noir of Hamilton and illustrate the strange confluence of structures that can share a single street address in this city, from industrial shells to family homes.

As has lately been the case on Art Crawl, Christ’s Church Cathedral was another popular nexus of activity throughout the night; between the Maker’s Market and ersatz-rock performances by Popeye’s Golden Theory, the exterior courtyard saw the sort of lively congregation that would make any medieval cathedral town proud. By 9pm, the sanctuary itself was transformed by another instalment of the New Harbours Music Series, this time featuring Bottom Feeder, Dark Mean and The Rest. The latter two in particular were fantastic and kept me happily slumped in my church pew through to the end of the night, and while I did make an attempt to capture the visual of the moment with sketches on scraps of paper in lieu of my battery-deficient camera, it’s probably more effective to illustrate their performances via the medium of You Tube.

While there’s a strong argument to say that Hamilton’s visual art has some ways to go, the prospect of the work involved to get there is less daunting in light of a local music scene that has already put in the effort to develop to its present strength. It should also bode well for next month’s inaugural Supercrawl, a music-heavy elaboration on the usual Art Crawl which will hopefully signal one of many innovations to come to this street in the near future.

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