As I was pulling together my thoughts on this month’s uneven exhibition efforts and not-entirely-pleasant cold, I finally recalled that I have no basis for comparison to last year’s January Crawl. This time last year, I’d been in Toronto for the opening of Misplaced: Animals Lost and Found at XPACE, in which I was showing The Plagues alongside other works on the animal condition in human civilization including Laura Paolini’s prolific installation Crocodile Tears, in which a robotic cat cries at the sight of a real cat frolicking on a television screen.

The handy circularity of this being the opportunity to revisit Laura Paolini’s Crocodile Tears among other works in her current solo exhibition at Hamilton Artists Inc. Hello, Schrodinger? accompanies the aforementioned robot cat with a recent video work in which two of the animatronic toy Persians argue the merits of a bathtub suicide attempt - the excess of flowing water in both works completes a semi-tragic narrative of the house cat’s life that balances on an unsteady edge between poignancy and hilarity.

Paolini excels at creating uncomfortable tableaux capable of conspiring with the viewer through playful gestures. The two other works in the exhibition are discrete object-installations activated by curiosity, be it the whispering hand dryer that blows hot air in the eavesdropper’s face or a voice-activated, prosthetic-tongue sex toy resting innocuously on an unfriendly, angular vanity. The latter is especially uncanny with its disembodied writhings, randomly triggered by calls made to its embedded phone line that lure some viewers to participate in the work while others are witness to its unexpected and admittedly disturbing movement.

An uncanny game of a different, perhaps more innocent sort is played out in Toni Hafkenscheid’s photographs of urban landmarks and streetscapes brought to The Print Studio by Toronto’s Birch Libralato. Hafkenscheid’s use of a soft focus lens and selectively saturated colour submerges his real-world imagery into a dream-like condition that makes a simulacrum of the subject from the thing itself. Beneath the photograph’s distancing resin surface, people appear miniaturized like a child’s toys, or like ants viewed by a sociopath with a magnifying glass in hand.

The shift in medium in The Print Studio’s Main Gallery - a space typically reserved for the presentation of printmaking practices - is synchronized to the opening upstairs of a newly-completed Digital Studio providing computer and print facilities for a variety of art applications. It’s a move forward that retains the studio’s focus on the accesses made possible by the multiple, and open access was being celebrated in a number of collaborative projects coinciding with the opening, from mug shots of guests to Janusz Wrobel’s urban landscapes upon which visitors were welcomed to write and draw at their leisure.

In the Members Space, these new directions fuse with traditional approaches in a small survey of works by The Print Studio’s course instructors, from Todd Murray’s photography to Brian Musson’s deft oil stick drawing of departing helicopters. The latter in particular is a simply exquisite work that reinforces the value of the hand’s own gesture in the midst of all this digital advancement.

While The Print Studio has gladly put their renovation project to rest, construction continues at the future home of the Hotel Hamilton studios. Its gutted lobby, still rife with attractive architectural remnants, played host to an impromptu installation of work while, for the first time in several months, the second floor of the building was accessible for tours and casual wanderers alike. At present, the building remains a skeletal promise of stud walls and tentative wiring, a slow-building work in progress.

Meanwhile, the best representation of potential is limited to the ground floor conglomeration of closely-clustered works subsuming any and all available wall space. The unpredictable mix of what could only be read as filler uncharitably combines a number of exceptional small works with depressingly drab canvases and lazy painted embellishments on unremarkable photographs. However, I was happy to see a few eerily filmic photo-lithographs from McMaster student Kearon Roy Taylor - one of many young artists who would be a benefit to this future creative site if the cost of studio rent were no object.

The sort of raw potential that’s boldly displayed without resolution at the yet-to-be Hotel Hamilton feels like evidence of a larger laxity that cropped up along the street that night. Post-holiday fatigue or fear of the cold could both be factors, but there were certainly fewer active spaces on the crawl, and long-standing fixture Loose Canon was closed for the night for reasons unknown (save for a window projection from the Hamilton Music Collective’s Portraits of Sound, but window installations just aren’t the thing for January).

One can hope that this is a mere holding of breath before the storm of something great, but it’s difficult to not feel a twinge of disappointment at the lowered expectations in evidence. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the visibly impromptu installation of cut-out wood pieces at You Me Gallery. Bryce Kanbara’s enlargements of frenetic bestial drawings are among his better works - his painted array of similarly rendered birds was a highlight of November’s Crawl - which makes it especially difficult to see these forms treated with such casual contempt by both artist and gallerist in one. Save for one beautifully ambiguous form seamlessly suspended perpendicular to the wall, the pieces are shabbily finished and hooked on wooden dowels that distract from both the perforated plane of the shapes and the wonderful shadows they cast on the wall. With time and care, this installation could have been stunning; in its present form, it feels thoughtless, a disappointment.

As an added kick in the face, the excess pieces of wood were still piled up in the gallery. They were trying to make a break for it behind the donuts, but still. Please.

I think the lesson to be derived here is that there is a time and a place for the appreciation of ramshackle aesthetics, a value that’s had largely in the transformation possible in seeming waste. Thankfully, Brian Kelly is more than adept at pulling this off, as demonstrated by his arrangement of found-object sculptures at James North Studio. Though each operates well as a unique object, the real strength of Kelly’s showing is his ability to establish a conversation among his component parts, sometimes through the literal connecting wires that imply an electric connection between the works.

In other cases, Kelly’s perceptible interest in narrative plays up the relationship between component parts, as in the visual pun enacted by Two men with hairy chests discuss sports scores with a dark stranger. The collective piece descends directly from Dada, with all the wry masculinities attached to that movement refreshingly intact.

In this exhibition, Kelly is well matched to fellow James Street North Collective artist Denis Fafard, whose heavily encrusted paintings accumulate found materials with less preciousness and a great deal more recklessness. There’s a greater element of chance in Fafard’s paintings, which echo minor notes from both Anselm Kiefer and Patterson Ewen without quite hitting upon either point, and while some experiments generate truly visceral moments, their recurrence is as unpredictable as Fafard’s technique in itself.

Unpredictability is a favourable quality, and one I had hoped to see more of in James North for 2010, but as the year progresses I’m hoping the surprises are less of the sort yielded by a lack of preparedness, and more in the way of subverting and expanding upon the expectations that have perhaps fatigued as many as are excited by the developments on this street. This isn’t an easy game to maintain, and one does wonder whether the time has come to change the rules.

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