It could be the emergence of some truly decent weather the night of the Crawl, but the street was especially lively this month in particular. A greater part of that would also be owed to the higher concentration of buskers up and down James North - no doubt a lingering demonstration in the wake of last month’s Busker Crawl, as there’s no better way to make a point about the validity of one’s craft than just plain doing-what-you-do.

And more power to you for doing it damn well. I do have to give extra props to this drum and tenor sax duo for their jazzy-ironic take on Edwin Starr’s “War” outside the John Weir Foote VC Armoury, home of the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry. It was exactly silly enough to make me smile near the end of a busy night.

Alistair MacLennan

Besides all the buskers, the great outdoors of James North also featured two performance works presented by Hamilton Artists Inc. Margaret Dragu’s ‘Verb Woman’ in the alcove of the former Jerry’s Man Shop was quite happily too busy for me to get a decent photo of her various interactions while mending visitors’ garments. Further down the block, Irish artist Alistair MacLennan was performing NO NOU ME NON, one of his many durational “actuations” referencing Ireland’s tempestuous history in the language of balance. Presented in collaboration with FADO in Toronto, the work was exceptionally haunting and impressive for the sheer steadiness of MacLennan’s performance, which was both arresting and understated, activating the vacant gravel lot as a place of potential magic.

As an aside in my capacity as a Programming Committee member for the Inc., this piece has particular resonance for me on account of the vast collaborative effort it took to answer MacLennan’s scavenger hunt of an equipment list. There was something normalizing yet further mystifying about the process of pulling together a mound of dirt, a sufficiently old-fashioned table, a fresh fish of at least twelve inches in length (gotta love the Farmer’s Market). On a more personal note, I’m particularly indebted to my father for the loan of one of his construction company’s vans and two remarkably un-weirded-out blokes to go with it to help transport a twenty-foot fir tree bough from Greensville to James North. It looked fantastic on site, though shoving a giant tree in the back of a van was about as un-romantic as art gets.

Amanda Delorey

Meanwhile, the Inc.’s gallery was wrapping up its exhibition of The Archive and Everyday Life, which has proven to be a largely successful experiment insofar as many of the works invite the sort of prolonged viewing that parallels the academic inquiry involved in its related conference. Kegan McFadden’s collection of found polaroids dating largely from 1970s Winnipeg are inherently fascinating in a voyeuristic, nostalgic sort of way, and Amanda Delorey’s schematic drawings of recorded movements through space are charmingly reduced from the language of scientific notation into something more personal and diaristic.

Brad Isaac

Peter Karuna

Brad Isaac (who sourced the giant fir bough noted above) and Peter Karuna continue to expand The Print Studio’s entry into photographic media with a joint exhibition of black and while prints. An exhibition title like ‘The Open’ demands some sort of explanation, and curator Ola Wlasuk obliges with a two-page essay referencing Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the uncertain space between human and animal cognition in the natural sphere that makes for fascinating reading but favours Isaac’s imagery of domesticated cats and dogs more than it does Karuna’s strange incursions of the manufactured world upon nature. In both artists’ works, what resonates above all else is the uncanny edge that haunts human comfort, from the cats that uneasily share space with their human companions in Isaac’s images to Karuna’s shot of a newly-laid sidewalk that ends in a place of grassy nowhere.

Ryan Laidman

In the Member’s Gallery, Ryan Laidman returns The Print Studio’s discourse to traditional print media by showing a series of nature-inspired prints predominantly featuring the coarser textures found in the landscape that generally appeal to the printmaker’s instincts. Their intricacies and depth are predictably appealing, but I found myself especially taken with the more ambiguous work pictured to the far left, featuring a bottomless black void crackling at its edges.

Bryce Huffman’s Studio

After many Crawls of previewing this space at varying stages of its extensive renovation, the Hotel Hamilton is effectively open for business and near full occupancy, though only a handful appeared as functional artists’ studios on the night of the Crawl. As a predominantly business-minded setting, the studio artists in the Hotel Hamilton tend to favour the more profitable spectrum of illustration and decorative arts (and I use these terms earnestly rather than derisively, having had both those adjectives lobbed at my own work a fair many times myself), and I was especially glad to see that Loose Canon regular Bryce Huffman has snagged a space on the third floor. I’ve always been fond of his propagandist sci-fi retro thing, and his new digs are set up to match - I think I used to have the same Jean-Luc Picard action figure as he’s got on top of his shelving here.

The Tiger Group

In other new developments on the Crawl, Movable [sic] Feast Online Gallery had its inaugural showing of represented works with a selection of paintings from the Tiger Group. It has to be said that Rick Cook, Rob Laffier, Bill Powell, Eric Ranveau and John Sterling are collectively damn proficient at their craft, even if all that skill is being bent to the tired purviews of the heroic male painter - trees, boats, sexually vulnerable young women. I don’t doubt that a market exists for this work, but much like the over-friendly drunken man I met on my way out of the Academica Hall, my reaction was merely to smile, nod and move the hell onward and out.

(At least when the website bombastically declares that “I believe that in art history the Tiger Group will one day be referred to in the same sentence as the Group of Seven.”, it has the force of literally being a self-fulfilling prophecy. But like I said, moving on.)

Fleur-Ange Lamothe

Jennifer Hambleton

Among the many group shows that pass across the walls at You Me Gallery, ‘Still Life’ is among the most seamless in recent memory, showing predominantly photo-based works that test the boundary of animal mortality in a way that makes me want to walk Ola Wlasuk’s essay down the road for an even better conceptual fit. Many of the subjects of Leo Davis, Fleur-Ange Lamothe and Jennifer Hambleton’s works echo the taxidermied birds included in the installation insofar as many are explicitly dead, though efforts are made to re-inject the liveliness that lingers in the corpse. Lamothe’s digital montages aesthetically appropriate these forms by their conjunction with word fragments, while Hambleton’s uncanny images of taxidermied animals poised in tableaux return her subjects to the open wilds of life, albeit that of the natural history museum.

Audrea Di and Matias Santini

Something fascinatingly rugged was afoot at the normally bright-eyed Loose Canon, which was presenting a collaborative project by sculptor Audrea Di and photographer Matias Santini. ‘Behind the City’ employs the language of art history, from classical Greece to minimalist sculpture of the 1960s to engage with the materiality of Hamilton’s dingier back alleys. Together, the artists have created an enigmatic intervention in which ambiguously draped forms lurk in shadows, documented by Santini’s photographs and transported as haunting relics into the gallery space. With the addition of strange apparatus and blinding lights aimed up against the wall, the experience both estranges and awakens the viewer to the imaginative potential to be found in our many derelict places.

Much like Alistair’s late-night ritual in the gravel lot across the road, it’s a project that proves the vitality of Hamilton in general, and James North’s transitional space in particular, as a medium for art-making of an honest but potentially magical sort. Seeing more art that aligns itself with these transformative currents was a welcome addition this Crawl, and could be a great benefit to future installations.

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