James North Art Crawl: February

One of the unspoken tensions of the Art Crawl is the extent to which the event revolves around spaces rather than their contents. There is a predictable assortment of galleries along the street that establish an art crawler’s routine more than the prospect of the art itself (if only because oftentimes the exhibitions are poorly advertised in advance), and any disruption in that routine is enough to break expectations intriguingly open. So you can imagine my anticipation at seeing not one, but two previously darkened doorsteps thrown wide open on this latest crawl.

Both these new manifestations were strange enough in their own right to make me hesitate at the entrances with a refreshing sense of being a complete outsider - fascinating to myself, but clearly off-putting to the countless other art crawlers I saw shuffle past both these doors after a cautious glance through the windows. In the case of the one-night-only installation/performance happening at the old Ginza Cafe at 133 James North (only discernible as “art” from the outside due to the almost-magical quality of the dangling lighting fixture outside), the unfamiliarity is understandable, but it may prove a detriment to State of the Art, whose clean signage seems to indicate a more permanent interest in being a gallery.

Located closer to Barton Street and away from the busier James-Cannon portion of the crawl, State of the Art took me by surprise at first glance and confused me further when I ventured inside. It could have been the use of candles to ineffectually light the largely illustrative work on display, or the fact that the few people inside all clearly knew each other and were enjoying a lounge moment around the central sofa and coffee table, but I was left with the distinct impression that I had just crashed someone’s too-trendy-for-thou house party - and despite what the movies tell you, that’s not the best vibe for a new gallery.

What I could see of the work was actually highly evocative of the selections that gallerist Dane Pedersen tends to favour at Loose Canon, which struck a disappointing but fun-loving blow to my hopes that this place would represent a new and as-yet-unheard voice in the community. I had even seen quite a few of the Bryce Huffman pieces on the crawl just a few months ago, which also took some of the shine off the newness of the place - case in point, the Bryce Huffman piece pictured above was actually photographed by my barely-adept self at Loose Canon, where the lighting is at least conducive to viewing the work.

Meanwhile, Loose Canon has opted to show the more visually complex work of Matt Pelletier, whose paintings and sculptural works tend to slow down viewing by stint of their unsettling diversity. While united by a conceptual thread that favours the gothic and macabre, Pelletier works across a range of stylistic approaches that reference anything from Renaissance altarpieces to high surrealism. Seeing such striking difference in a single solo presentation isn’t always a convincing experience, but the few truly exceptional works tend to stand on their own strengths. One of the smaller works in the show, The Ballad of the Pepperell Street Flood, is strangely arresting for its Egon Schiele-like renderings of three mysterious figures in a disturbingly flat space where the wood-collaged floor pushes subtly forward: its formal qualities are a direct echo of the disturbing tableau it portrays.

Another derivation from my usual art crawl path was a trip upstairs to the third floor of 175 James Street North, typically home to painters of the portraits-and-flowers variety that will sadly never float my postmodern boat but word of mouth had alerted me to a showing of work by a colleague from my anatomy-lab-drawing days in Jessica Roth’s studio/gallery space. Sean Porter Scott’s formalist experiments in painting and assemblage were an incongruous but not unwelcome surprise in this repurposed gallery, with its generous and airy space highlighted by the miniature scale of most of Scott’s paper constructions. The smallest and most delicate of these evoke an element of child’s play reinforced by the remnants scattered over the floor, perhaps too painstakingly arranged in the spirit of Jessica Stockholder to be truly playful.

Though not to be confused (as I certainly was) with the aforementioned painter, Sean Scott is among the photographers collected together for End of the Century at Mixed Media, an inevitably political visual document of the demolition of the Century Theatre on Mary Street. This collective elegy of bitter loss is only made truly poignant by the redemption of anonymously donated historic photos of the Century in its original glory. The vintage images of the marquee announcing many cinematic classics presents a necessary understanding of the former life of the place before its current destruction which would otherwise ring unfortunately hollow.

The James North Art Collective has continued to adeptly pair its member artists by presenting sculptor Dawn Hackett’s ceramic and wood pieces with the monotypes and oil paintings of Doug Carter - both bodies of work trigger something of a Group of Seven depiction of nature that manages to exceed the drawbacks of that old-school type. For all their uniformity of surface, Carter’s painted images are lively things that reference the leaves conspicuously missing from Hackett’s fragmented birch trunks extended by ceramic prostheses. These totemic trees scattered throughout the gallery especially reinforce the overall impression of a forest exploded into playful possibilities, the darker implications of such an exercise notwithstanding.

The mass flock of sheep waiting the window of You Me Gallery operate on a similar edge between childlike delight and something more sinister. Charming though they are, one doesn’t need to wander far into this installation of work by Clarissa Inglis to realize that this undertaking definitely qualifies for a darker interpretation. The flock of Go Forth and Multiply lends its title to an immersive show deriving from the artist’s travels in Mexico and Central America, in which she examines the aesthetic and dogma of the prevalent Catholicism of those regions.

Inglis’ installations and mixed media drawings are weighted by a gendered critique of Roman Catholicism’s expectations upon women, yet the success of her critique lies in her ability to sublimate those concerns into subtle visual cues that play off the lustre and decadence of the religious aesthetic. Nothing is explicitly given away in these works, though the crawling snakes and collected crucifixes effectively conjure a great deal of Inglis’ uneasiness with her subject matter.

Another understated body of work was presented by Kristian Nesbitt in his solo exhibition at ArtWord ArtBar’s downstairs gallery. While the many monoprints on show employ a repeating vocabulary of markmaking - some of it explicitly attributed to the influence of Jackson Pollock - each work manages to demonstrate something unique unto itself, deftly avoiding the spell of repetition that can plague printmaking and finding new possibilities in various combinations of layers and shapes. I’d certainly recommend a look at his website (linked above), if only to see better quality images that support my praise better than my second-rate stealth photography can demonstrate here.

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