Even with the relief of some much-needed rain on Friday morning, a summer Art Crawl is an inevitably humid affair. The galleries do their best to keep things tolerable with cold beer and hard-working fans but the best thing going is always the stack of curatorial statements and exhibition cards I tend to accumulate as reference for posts such as this; braced up inside this month’s issue of H Magazine, all that paper makes for a fairly passable fanning device.

Still, I was mildly covetous of the large, splashy fans hanging in Artword Artbar’s relatively cool basement gallery this month. Arcangles features a collaborative selection of painted fans and related constructions by Holly Briesmaster and Janice Jackson. The sculptural explorations of the arching formal structure of the fan are among the more interesting objects and bear a modernist concern that is reflected in the brightly blocked motifs applied to the found fans. These designs are not always painted convincingly, nor do they truly explore the dimensional qualities of the fan so playfully demonstrated in the sculptural assemblages, but the overall effect of the show remains visually pleasing.

The Factory’s one-night screening event for this month’s Crawl was Ashley Guindon’s installation A Great Mystery. Curated by Andrew Butkevicius, this ephemeral environment superimposes images and sound from three digital projectors in a virtually unreadable cycle of video, though the viewer can easily walk in front of a projector to eliminate a layer of imagery and make the others more visible. This non-linear ambiguity is rather the point of this “great mystery,” though the mundane found footage of commonplace group gatherings sourced from home movies of the artist’s church as a youth falls short of engaging the viewer in the sort of profound experience described in Butkevicius’ curatorial text.

From Butkevicius to Brad Isaacs’ curatorial work at Loose Canon, I am appreciating the increased visibility of the curator on James Street North with all the sharpened professional edge and critical writing that comes with that. Psychic Space also aims at the depths of human experience and hits closer to the mark with a refined selection of works by Katie Pretti and Amy Friend. The latter’s photographs (above) are wonderfully suggestive for all their crisp finish, pulling drowning white forms teasingly in and out of dense black waters. The amorphous shapes of these billowing Ophelias find their echo in Pretti’s grittier paintings across the gallery; despite the lighter, more forgiving palette these are infinitely darker works with references to Goya’s cannibals around the scumbled edges of bulbous shapes that imply bodies or land or the monstrous fusion of both in the wake of some uncertain disaster.

Carrying on an in-house tradition of highlighting the underknown places of Hamilton, Mixed Media is hosting an exhibition of Rafael Ferreira’s photographs documenting the considerable commercial decline of Barton Street. The romantic aura of the vintage storefronts is heightened by the metallic silver finish on many of the black-and-white prints, drawing the viewer even further backward in time into a past that is idealized for all its dereliction in the now.

Photography was out in full force on this Crawl, and most especially at The Print Studio with its annual community exhibition highlighting Studio 12, a photographic collective off-shoot from the Hamilton Camera Club founded in 2009. As an exhibition title, Four Corners most fittingly references the four corners of the world that seem to be the subject of many of the landscape-driven photographs, from Arctic glaciers to desert sand dunes - it’s content fit to make a person ache to travel. Envy aside, many of the works do achieve a visual transformation of content that exceeds mere documentation of gorgeous settings, such as the eerie flattening that occurs in Shirley Dennis’ Deadvlei Namibia (2009) or the painterly richness of Martin Renters’ Artist’s Palette (2009, above).

One might be tempted to say it’s the same naturalist routine happening down the road at You Me Gallery with Michel Proulx’s A Week at Rice Lake, but his photographs are, aesthetically speaking, of a rather different order of understanding. The volume of intense surface details combined with their presentation as grids contained within precise black outlines aligns this work with a sort of scientific survey of a chosen ecosystem unsettled by the illusion of otherworldly apparitions. The dense black edges of the pearlescent surfaces that dominate Proulx’s photo-manipulations does draw the mind disturbing close to the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s an association difficult to defend when images of oil spills sit so close to the collective unconscious these days anyway.

Next door, the James North Art Collective has compiled a summer group exhibition that offers a mix of new contributors alongside the collective’s familiar names. More Francis Ward is never a bad thing in my mind, and I did enjoy the quirky strangeness of her burbs in space (above right) and the indirect conversation it shared with Jim Mullin and Richard Mace’s Untitled #4 (above left). Great little sculptures from Doug Carter and Barb Sachs rounded out the light-hearted mood of the group, though the real strength of the show is in the sheer diversity of individually interesting works, and its fun in the effort of puzzling it all together.

Teri Donovan’s paintings in Half-Life at Hamilton Artists Inc. layer photographs of the artist’s female family members with wallpaper patterns and domestic tableaux in encaustic-rich compositions conflating personal histories and the social expectations of a given era. The creeping interference of painterly flourishes into these staid, wax-like figures complicates the polite vintage charm of the resulting paintings, though these touches are most effective in the instances where they are used sparingly and the florid wallpapers are reined back from becoming too comfortably decorative. At their most simplistic, these outdated women retain a powerful foothold in the present, demanding prolonged consideration of their place in time.

What to all appearances started out as an art student’s apartment-gallery is still going strong in the summer months, with Know Your Ghosts at 255 1/2 James Street North (through the nondescript door then all the way up the stairs) featuring a solo exhibition of drawings by Jason Lee. The many modest portraits in The Middle Ground are refreshingly direct precisely for that very modesty, which allows Lee’s deft draftsmanship to shine through in compositions that balance areas of decadent colour with brief, suggestive line. A more vulnerable, diaristic hanging of loose-leaf drawings presides over a hidden corner of the space, and features here primarily because it was the most easily photographed. If Know Your Ghosts is in this for the long run, I would implore its inhabitant-curator to invest in some decent lighting. And I do hope this space endures for a while longer yet - at the other end of the spectrum from curatorial essays, impromptu galleries in artist apartments can breathe fresh new life into an art community, and Jason Lee’s current showing there is a vital demonstration of that fact.

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