Even before this month’s Crawl kicked off, I had suspected it would be a busy one, and I wasn’t half-right about that one. It wouldn’t be any exaggeration to say this was easily the most successful instalment of the Crawl in recent years, for crowd and atmosphere as much as for the quality of the art on show. There was plenty to see, and with much of it strong enough to sustain prolonged viewing I was amazed to find that even at a somewhat-hurried clip, it took me twice as long as usual to make my way up and down the street that night.

This therefore might be the time to issue a general challenge - to artists, to galleries and organizations, and perhaps most importantly to audiences. With the Art Crawl rocking at this capacity, we clearly have the energy to spread it out over more than one night a month. Risky though it may be at first, this scene might now be mature enough to sustain events and openings across the whole possibility presented by the calendar instead of putting all our eggs in that second-Friday basket. But that’s a proposition far bigger than I, in need of greater depth of discussion, so let’s carry on for now.

For all the bluster and bustle on this Art Crawl, it wasn’t without its more contemplative and sobering moments, the most memorable of which was You Me Gallery’s installation of remnants of the late George Wallace’s Educational Experiment (1969), a massive monument that used to sit on the Mohawk College campus but has languished in storage this past decade on account of rust damage, or some such excuse. As fragments arrayed in a gallery setting, they have their own restored power and resonance, but it’s difficult to escape the awareness that this work has been diminished from what it should be.

Accompanying this haunting tribute is a hanging of Wallace’s drawings and prints. Though I could have wished for a tighter selection and a more thoughtful presentation than the pinned plastic sleeves, their presence demonstrates Wallace’s staggering abilities as a draughtsman as well as a sculptor, reinforcing the indispensable connection between these two skills and their mutual importance in the development of Wallace’s fine legacy.

Incidentally, more of Wallace’s work is currently on view at the McMaster Museum of Art and will no doubt be worth a look as well. Wish I could say for sure but the opening was - you guessed it - same night as the Art Crawl. Seriously, folks, let’s diversify already.

Between the muted lighting and the ambient trickle of water, Jane Adeney’s Transubstantiations at Hamilton Artists Inc. is another sombre highlight that makes for a cooling sanctuary in a space that often feels narrow and humid around this time of year. The relative darkness provides a fitting setting for Adeney’s (meta)physically dense ceramic sculptures, allowing their subtle video elements to shine through from their concealed interiors. Within the heavy, earthy context of these vessels, the digital media employed to render eggs and other primordial symbols within the installation achieve a wonder not unlike magic.

As has become their June tradition, all The Print Studio’s exhibition space this month is dedicated to showing the plentiful results of their various art education programs with the downtown area’s high-needs schools. Core Images 2 is subsequently tightly packed with colour and inevitably charming block prints of various critters. I’ve no doubt said as much in previous years, but there’s an honesty in children’s art that I never fail to enjoy on its own terms, and this year’s collection was no exception.

Equal to my critical helplessness in the face of children’s art is my reaction to children’s writing, as in this letter to artist-educators Matt McInnes and Victoria Alstein: My favourite part is when we did the prints it was cool. And working with the ink. Was the paint made a long time ago like 1970? Awww.

Although I was a contributor to this mail-art/book-art project, The Portable Library Project’s present installation at Mixed Media was my first opportunity to see the finished series assembled in one place and to finally have a hands-on look at the work of my fellow collaborators. On a personal basis at the very least, I was interested to see the range of approaches the other artists took to the challenge of producing one “book” per day over a period of seven days; knowing full well that the complexity of each of my books was clearly impacted by the time I had available on a given day, I was duly impressed by those artists who maintained a consistent level of craft across their own libraries. I especially enjoyed Sheila Jonah’s series of miniature concertina books, and am sure that many of the other libraries are worth a slower, more thorough look than I could spare during the evening.

For the first time that I can recall, Artword Artbar’s downstairs gallery space has been split between two distinct artists, with Karijn deJong presenting in the alcove at the bottom of the stairs in what, for these purposes, is being called the Small Gallery. Nautical Nursery Rhymes describes itself as an installation dedicated to Marilyn Monroe’s legacy as a cultural icon, which doesn’t necessarily gel with the predominantly little-girl-Victorian objects being pulled together around the suspended anomaly of a ballerina’s tutu. Marilyn’s poorly-drawn visage does recur in the framed paintings peppering the space but even that explicit clue is puzzling in combination with these elements that, if narrowed down to a more concise form, could make for a curiously engaging installation on something else entirely. There’s a magical quirk in the round mirror revealing a kitschy child’s umbrella beneath the tutu, creating a moment that would have been quite telling without the clutter of sea shells confusing the scene.

Also at Artword Gallery was Linda Joyce Ott’s Auto Parts series of photographs. I didn’t get any decent installation shots but you can catch the gist of the show on Ott’s website. The loving close-ups of sleek vintage car details are a lot closer to Marilyn’s time period and eroticism, but as photographic prints they lack the crisp finish that would make that chrome truly shine.

Lee Bondzio + Laura Marotta

Cross Contamination at Loose Canon Gallery brings together eight artists in a collaborative experiment wherein unfinished works are swapped between randomly generated pairs by a third party, leaving each artist responsible for the completion of their received work. With the addition of DJ Norman Bates at the opening, the gallery was even more packed than usual, which meant that not all the resulting works were readily viewable (I can be pretty single-mindedly pushy in these circumstances, but even my pointy elbows have their limits). Of what I did see, Lee Bondzio and Laura Marotta shared in the production of two of the more intriguing works of the night - a small blue snail sunk within a sewn circle on a white paper field, and a sculptural wooden cube containing a layered plexi (I presume) homage to Space Invaders. As in all the works on show, there’s no indicator of who controlled the beginning or end of these works, which makes for an interesting subversion of process and the artist’s final authority. What truly impresses in these two pieces in particular is that both artists clearly had enough restraint to cease and desist at relatively simple forms, rather than drowning out what they received with their own distinct ego.

After two poor showings chased down by a For Lease sign, I was relieved to see a great deal more energy in The State of the Art space just south of Barton. Wolfpack Creative is for all intents and purposes a new entity on my particular radar, but like Loose Canon they should be congratulated for creating one of the more vibrant and welcoming atmospheres of anywhere on the street. Given that my previous experiences in this space have been marked by the awkward sensation of having accidentally wandered into an apartment party where only the cool kids from high school were invited, it’s gratifying to know that it wasn’t the fault of the admittedly imperfect space, but a question of who and what fills those slightly-unstable walls. If only the folks in charge could secure some decent lighting, this could be the start of another good venue for the street.

It’s also reassuring to see Krysten Bell exhibiting again so soon after her recent Summa exhibition, but even better to see some seriously fantastic painting from Manny Trinh, whose patchwork industrial landscapes with their strange balance of murkiness and intense brightness were among the most accomplished painting I saw all night.

Case in point: I gave Movable [sic] Feast a lot of leeway on its first Crawl appearance at Academica Hall on the basis of the technically accomplished selection of paintings shown from the Tiger Group. And while Eric Ranveau remains as good as he was last month, he hasn’t been done any favours by being shown alongside the sort of imagery that puts me in mind of Duran Duran album cover art (with no offence intended to Duran Duran, of course). Between that and this disputed dealing of a Conrad Furey, I’m about ready to stop dignifying this illiterate affair with any further critical response if the selection of work is going to continue to pretend that the twenty-first century hasn’t been happening for quite some time now.

Naturally I don’t say that as any slight to history either, because the archival work on hand in If Walls Could Talk at James North Studio is all the proof one needs that the past can be very effectively framed in a relevant contemporary art practice. Jim Chamber’s act of excavating and documenting the remnants of previous occupants of James North Studio’s current building is not unlike the archaeological practice of Mark Dion, though Chambers’ less finicky installation is a more relaxed affair that permits a great deal of local inquisitiveness when left to breath beyond the safe confines of the archive and the vitrine.

In terms of something-new, this was my first Crawl for taking in an exhibition at Downtown Bike Hounds, which is the sort of beautifully quirky venue that misleads visitors into reading the entire shop as an art installation and moving on. Those looking more carefully were rewarded by Karen Suk’s meticulous series of works combining painting and printmaking. Arranged in groupings within their frames, the repeating series of natural motifs reveal infinite potential for variations in line and colour, each retaining enough of the artist’s hand to make every small square subtly precious among its equals.

Though another rarity on my Crawl activities, I was determined to end my evening at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre to see a reprise of last year’s spectacular Le Cyc along with the collective’s newest work. Now called Polydactyl Hearts Collective, the Guelph-based art/music group was commissioned to create a new work as part of this year’s Images Festival in Toronto. Hello Adventure is a strikingly different type of performance in six parts that saw its Hamilton premiere that night along with what proved to be the last performance of Le Cyc given the departure of vibraphonist/vocalist Andra Zommers - and just as well given that the opening propagandist monologue of this brilliant bicycle-socialist, graphic-novel rock-opera just wouldn’t be the same without her uniquely soft-yet-stern vocals.

Compared to the linear narrative and stable imagery of Le Cyc, Hello Adventure is a far riskier proposition rife with abstract visual effects and a creeping sense of horror drawn out by an unexplained cast of monstrous beings who intermingle, interfere with and sometimes devour only slightly more normative figures. The renderings themselves have also taken a drastic leap away from the still-image frames of Le Cyc’s graphic novel format in favour of true animations in which people and places are drawn, erased, painted and eradicated in time to the relentlessly powerful live soundtrack. This expanded range of visual tricks explodes the range of mark-making contained in the projected images, even to the point of losing cohesion when minimal charcoal line drawing trips too readily into broad smears of oil paint, but the jarring effect somehow reconciles itself as part of the wider dystopian vision of the work.

And because I’ve been too overwhelmed with work these past five days to think straight let alone turn out this report in a reasonable length of time, I’m just gonna come out and ask - am I the only person who thinks this blue creature thing looks just like an Ood?

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