James North Art Crawl: April

I’m going to do my best to keep this one brief, particularly because the pickings were rather slim this month and a couple of the more interesting shows were held over from March anyway.

Which doesn’t mean they’re not worth seeing - Arounna Khounnoraj (above) and Emma Nishimura at The Print Studio in particular were perhaps even better on a second, slower viewing - but there’s little point in talking up the same art two months in a row. Moving on.

Unfortunately, my first attempt to sample fresh meat by stepping into Blue Angel Gallery didn’t yield anything fresh so much as dredge up the ghost of Linda Towart’s seemingly popular oil paintings. By way of context, Towart’s murky paintings-from-photographs of jazz musicians used to hang in the Second Cup in Westdale where I formerly whiled away the odd afternoon and evening during my time at Mac some eight to ten years ago. They were pretty dreadful object lessons on how not to paint, given how each image managed to amplify every flaw of copying from the commercial photograph. Given time and practice, I’d have expected any artist to improve on those shortcomings, but if anything these repetitive things have gotten worse, with even more ignorantly rendered hands like alien jellyfish spouting off tube-like arm-things.

This is why life drawing classes are such a damn good thing. On that note, Dane at Loose Canon reminded me that This Ain’t Hollywood is hosting $10/person life drawing sessions for ages 19+ on Tuesday nights from 7-9pm, featuring “a variety of burlesque performers, musicians, and other worldly folks titillating your pencil in feathers, leather, victorian garb and much much more…” I’d definitely be there tonight if it weren’t for my Inc. committee meeting, but anyone else keen to hone their drawing skills should definitely turn up and show their support for what sounds like a potentially awesome service to our local artists.

Having now gone off-topic, I may as well stick to Dane and bring this around to his themed Circus show at Loose Canon this month (and big congrats on the five year anniversary!). I have to admit that like the rest of the crawl, it came out a bit thin compared to his past wonderfully themed shows on Robots and Cowboys, but it did feature a great knitted elephant balancing on a ball from recurring favourite-of-mine Courtney Lakin.

At Artword Gallery, ‘Meditations and Landscapes’ brings together selected works on paper by the late Gilda Mekler. Curated by Artword curator Judith Sandiford and Mekler’s husband, poet James Deahl, the exhibition is a sensitive archive of Mekler’s repetitive investigations that revisited a Japanese-inspired series of landscapes and botanicals with visible patience that yielded a number of deftly confident works like the elegant ink study above.

Thinking through this crawl seems to be dragging me around a recurring lesson on the importance of study to the making of art, which makes it comparatively easy to address the installation of V. Jane Gordon’s Enhanced Studio class at You Me Gallery. As a former pupil of Jane’s (for life drawing, funny you should ask), I was quietly amused to recognize some of the inherited tropes of her teaching, particularly the graphite-swirled vellum work suspended in the window like a signpost to her teaching method. ‘we @ you me’ is an annual tradition at the gallery, and this is perhaps one of the most cohesive groups I’ve seen presented from this context; this all-female group has clearly developed as a collective, all engaged in a sort of syncretic poetry that accompanies their work like conceptual clues to a shared thesis.

In case it hasn’t become entirely clear by now, this month’s new shows were largely fledgling efforts of beginnings and ends without the strikingly juicy middle grounds I was craving. Thankfully, Frances Ward transcended the muddle with ‘intersections’ at James North Studio, featuring her moodily formal paintings and some truly wonderful photographs detailing decaying roads in what I safely presume to be Hamilton. Concisely reflecting her interest in the collision of the natural and the manufactured, Ward’s close-ups abstract this urban aggravation and return it to a form that echoes the earth beneath the asphalt. The transformation is simple yet resonant, and exactly the sort of work I love seeing at its best.

As an endnote, it was good to see the Sky Dragon folks mounting a visual presence at 228 James Street North, which has taken on the look of an ad hoc rallying centre for the campaign to save the co-op from foreclosure. Even with a three-month extension from the Teacher’s Credit Union, time is still running out, so people should still keep an eye on Save the Dragon to learn how they can help.

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