Most of my critical writing energies these past few days have been gobbled up in the task of producing another Hamilton report for Akimblog. As this is the fifth cross-city blog post that I’ve written for Akimbo, I’m beginning to recognize an alarming trend in my coverage - namely, my reliance upon a mere handful of visual arts institutions to provide sufficient content to represent Hamilton’s art scene in a nation-wide context.

More often than not, it’s simply bad timing in my editor-dictated deadlines that can sometimes fall in that crucial gap between exhibitions or in that deathly lull in the week leading up to an Art Crawl (as is the case this time around), but the sum result remains the same. Time and time again, my search for nationally relevant contemporary art within Hamilton’s boundaries lands me in the same places: the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the McMaster Museum of Art, and transit Gallery. Reliable institutions all, and that’s exactly my problem. ‘Reliable’ is such a sad adjective to have to apply to art.

Increasingly frustrated by the dearth of innovative contemporary art installations to be had in my city, I barrelled my way through all the online art listings I could find and was partially rewarded by the discovery of Tomer Diamant’s Nuit Blanche sculpture Rescue Bubble in the atrium of the Royal Botanical Gardens. So I have at least managed a whiff of variety in this post - which I’ll be sure to link from here once it goes live - but the foot-stamping child in me wants to have an experience like that one to report every time Akimbo comes a-knocking at my door. And all the time in between, for that matter.

Hamilton does not lack the means to launch art exhibitions
in unusual places - one only need look to TH&B, Exile on James Street 3 at the former Bank of Montreal (from 2000, and lamentably undocumented online) and Urban Moorings for just a few examples of art that thrives outside our relatively narrow gallery system. But the other thing these exhibitions have in common is that they were all massive undertakings - group shows of a monumental nature that, brilliant as they were in their time, are such organizational challenges that they are unlikely to recur on more than a bi-annual basis (as is the case with Urban Moorings, scheduled to take place again in 2010).

The presence of hard-working and dedicated artists in Hamilton will come to nought from a critical standpoint unless their work is able to reach a wider audience than what is allowed by our existing institutions. The James North Art Crawl provides a potential solution to the problem, but after two years of documenting that monthly event I have seen more innovation being poured into the wider culture and business of the thing than I have seen in the art itself (but that’s a discussion for another day). In this sort of climate, it becomes contingent on artists and curators to re-examine a city’s raw matter for new opportunities, and I can’t help but feel that Hamilton has lots of raw matter.

Not for the first time, I’ve been thinking about this problem in comparison to Glasgow, which suffered from a similar stagnation in exhibition space in the 1990s. Much of the artist-run culture that made Glasgow the contemporary art mecca it is today was built in response to that need, making use of an excess of vacant space to put on quick and dirty exhibitions at a sometimes dizzying pace.

One of the best examples of that practice was Switchspace: for five years, painting students Sorcha Dallas and Marianne Greated curated many risk-taking short-run exhibitions, first in Dallas’ own flat and eventually in a rotating series of unoccupied flats through Glasgow’s East End thanks to an arrangement with a local property agent (this archived article from The Scotsman gives a more comprehensive history of Switchspace for those interested). Not only did this slapdash approach lead to some brilliant installations and Sorcha Dallas’ own successful gallery, but also generated a strong art-driven community that successfully communicated each new exhibition venue - the very slippery quality of Switchspace was itself a cause for collaboration of sorts.

At least in terms of pacing, memories of Switchspace and many similar ventures still going strong in Glasgow today made me exceedingly fond of Show and Tell Gallery’s tenure at James North Studio where weekly experimentation by art students was the norm. I’m not sure that I’ve seen that same spirit of risk and immediacy in Hamilton since then, but I’d sure like to have more of it in the future.

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