James North Art Crawl: December

I am hopeful that with the New Year will come a solution for how I handle future instalments of the James North Art Crawl on this blog. In truth, I scarcely handled it at all last month save for some passing remarks in my report on The Big Picture Revisited on the sustainability of this venture. While the thought deserves greater detail, for now I will repeat that “Participation and community are the commodities of choice in a sector like James Street North,” to the effect that what we might call the relational aesthetics of the thing have begun to outstrip the focus on works of art in themselves.

The communal model of art production and presentation on this street is especially apparent in the festive goodwill of December lending itself to year-end group presentations at the James North Art Collective and Hamilton Artists Inc. among others. The latter’s Members Exhibition is an annual tradition at the Inc. and one that invariably splashes the broadest contrasts across Hamilton’s art scene. One of Fiona Kinsella’s sumptuous oil paintings shares the gallery space with a cardboard castle by the artist’s niece, with countless other curiosities cropping up everywhere in between. Wayne Allen’s brittle wooden angel provides a poignant pause in the colourful installation of work, as does a sombre suspended rope sculpture by Helen Sovereign.

Sovereign also has two smaller pieces included in You Me Gallery’s exhaustive holiday showing of works by a range of established regional artists (pictured at right alongside an astutely-paired Brian Kelly). With this significant crowd of artists limited to a couple works apiece, there was opportunity to see each at their best, or their most surprising in the case of a Delio Delgado painting (pictured at left) whose subtle monumentality was strangely different from anything else I’ve seen of his work so far in my short two years of viewing his work locally.

The Print Studio has a similar tradition of turning inward during the holiday season by presenting a selection of two studio artists in both its galleries. Deb Dema’s waterless lithography technique produces a body of prints that nevertheless possess the sort of fluidity that tends to recur in many of the studio’s artists. Visual movement is an explicit motif in Maureen Isnor’s layered abstractions referencing dance notations with a whiff of Kandinsky around the edges, though Isnor’s use of line adds a rigidity to her compositions when compared to Dema’s free-floating shapes.

Courtney Lakin has been a recurring artist at Loose Canon with her often-ironic soft sculptures - her meticulously crocheted gatling gun was the highlight of Loose Canon’s gangster-themed show. Now given a solo presentation with Hook, Line and Needle, Lakin has the opportunity to showcase her technical skill within its own surprisingly minimalist context. While her gatling gun (which is included in this show) still represents the high point in her playful collision of demure womanly craft with hard-hitting imagery, the other works are equally impressive for their meticulous detail and ongoing appropriation of traditionally masculine trophies.

Another reassuringly individualistic showing in the midst of December’s group hug came from David Collier, who was launching Volume 2 of his iconic Hamilton Sketchbook at Mixed Media. A long-standing veteran of Canada’s alternative graphic novel scene, Collier’s wry and wordy comic narratives present a historically-minded view of Hamilton that remain sharply contemporary for their quirky idiosyncrasies. His uniquely honest view of the city in which he lives yields precisely the sort of work that a critically engaged James North needs to thrive in the long-term.

In the meantime, both Mixed Media and the street’s many shops and galleries are chock-full of fun holiday gift-giving ideas. I picked up some awesome Christmas cards at White Elephant during the Crawl, so I can definitely recommend the shopping at the very least.

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