James North Art Crawl: March

Despite the chilling sort of rain that half-tempted me to just stay in for the evening (to say nothing of a new episode of Caprica on Space), traffic at this month’s art crawl was going strong such that I spent the first twenty minutes circling the neighbourhood in search of parking. Great for the crawl, but positively shitty for my selfish needs. So to everyone who risked saying hello in the fifteen minutes following this mini-adventure, I apologize for ranting about the parking. High attendance is a good thing.

My snarling irritation aside, I did shut up long enough to take a long appreciative look at Jude Norris’ exhibition Mooswa, Muskwa, PuskwaMoostoos - Digital Creations
with Immemorial Relations at Hamilton Artists Inc. The exhibition seamlessly fuses imagery derived from Norris’ Plains Cree descent with digital technologies, blazing a trail of Photoshop-rendered buffalo that lead the viewer into the darkness at the back of the gallery. Two remarkably intimate video pieces are situated behind the black curtain; the first projects an urban crowd scene onto a suspended antler in a quietly deft balancing act but the most remarkable work by far is The Definition of Bear (pictured above). In this work, a blinding-bright digital projection of a bear lumbers across the pages of a dictionary held open by what I would presume to be a bear’s skull while an accompanying soundtrack recites the varying meanings of “bear” (and it is a truly burdened word). It’s a powerfully meditative work in which the moving image appears to crawl from underneath the dictionary’s text in a masterfully fused relationship.

At The Print Studio, Hitoko Okada has curated a pairing of artists whose works take printmaking into delicately dimensional practices. Arounna Khounnoraj plays effectively on the medium’s emphasis on the multiple with an installation of hollow paper forms suspended outward from the wall like fine seed pods set loose on the air. This expansive installation is accompanied by small framed assemblages of found elements and felt playfully stitched together, visually diverse from the minimal touch of her paper sculptures but neatly aligned with the show’s attested theme of reclaiming identities through the gestures of sewing.

That theme is ever more readily played out in Emma Nishimura’s photogravure etchings in which fragile dress forms float chameleon-like over patterned vistas suggesting vast stretches of water and land. Disarmingly beautiful at first glance, the work gradually reveals a narrative of displacement closely aligned to the artist’s Japanese heritage, further complicating this finely-crafted body of images.

While no longer open on a regular basis, the former OK Food Mart at 237 James Street North still hosts the occasional exhibition in its versatile vacancy. For this month’s art crawl, the space is one of the exhibition venues for The Greenbelt, a province-wide show organized by Gallery 1313 in Toronto. While serving as a celebratory marker of the fifth anniversary of the Greenbelt’s protected status, many of the works remain preoccupied with those elements that threaten to infringe upon the environment. It’s a strategy that yields predictably political work in some cases and wryly simple objects in others, such as Daniel Durocher’s Lead Fish (exactly what it describes) and Warren Quigley’s peculiarly foreign wooden spheres - rough-hewn things that are strangely and unnaturally refined at the same time.

I’ve been lamenting the loss of a regular student presence on the art crawl since the end of last year’s Show and Tell Gallery at the James North Studio, so was pleased to see a group of McMaster third year art students taking the initiative with Futures, a one-night showing by Chris Aucoin, Jeremy Forsyth, Kearon Roy Taylor and Leah Klein in a fellow classmate’s upstairs flat. Even stripped down to white walls, the space is unmistakably residential and full of quirky turnings of corners that lend themselves to a crowded installation. While a more restrained selection of work might have been preferable, the saturation of images creates an urgent energy that is fused into a collaborative installation of multi-coloured string stretched along the ceiling from one end of the room to the other; its bright primary colours pluck threads from all four artists’ works and draw what might have been an irreconcilably diverse range of practices neatly - albeit temporarily - together.

A number of McMaster students are also represented in the collaborative RevWear exhibition at Loose Canon. Curated by Victoria Hayes, the show brings together photos and assorted ephemera from their recent annual fashion show featuring Bauhaus-esque outfits assembled from recycled materials. While the dress made from Tim Horton’s coffee cups was perhaps the most iconic, Marya Folinsbee’s sweatsock hoodie was the most convincing transformation of the physical garments on display, simple and understated enough to stand out within a predominantly chaotic display.

Artword Gallery, meanwhile, is gradually setting a pattern for exhibiting cleanly vibrant abstractions with a show from Polish-born, Hamilton-based painter Tadek Soberiajski, whose densely layered canvases are intended to evoke the transformation of memory. That objective is perhaps best realized in some of the works pictured above, in which open spaces lend an ambiguous subjectivity to his chaotic whorls of paint. The majority favour an impenetrable screen of brushstrokes that suggest something more troubling and indifferent in this mind, and the inclusion of an isolated portrait amid all this seemingly non-objective work is a little jarring. Excluding the latter, the impressive quantity of these repetitive paintings does make for an intriguing installation.

Though I know of David Brace as co-owner of transit Gallery on Locke Street, Definitely (Maybe) at You Me Gallery was my first encounter with his visual work. Using self-consciously rough portions of drywall as supports, Brace’s works push a series of male portraits through the paces of varyingly grotesque transformations in phototransfer and painting that obscure and repeat their subjects throughout the exhibition. There’s an unmistakable historical fetish at work in the series, from the archival quality of some of the source material to the aged materials to the recurring nods to Francis Bacon in some of the renderings, though the result is ultimately confident and cohesive, and yet another highlight on what was a remarkably successful crawl.

So successful, in fact, that it’s especially shameful that this particular report is coming a full week after the fact - it’s a new record for lateness, folks, for which I should apologize, especially after the thoughtful shout-out to this particular feature from Dane at Loose Canon. I will try to be more timely in future when daylight savings and stress isn’t wreaking havoc on my work ethic.

On the upside, it’s Friday again and that means yet another new episode of Caprica to look forward to tonight with no openings (that I’m aware of) to interfere with my simple-minded enjoyment of robots and fedoras.

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