Unnaturally dense fogs last Friday night prevented me from taking my usual tour of the James North Art Crawl, which has made the task of catching up on new exhibitions along the street a matter of small measures between much-needed hours in the studio. Thankfully, one of the more irregular installations for this month’s Crawl was conveniently located next door and hosting opening hours throughout the week. And given the quiet pleasure in viewing this exhibition in relative peace and quiet outside of the typical Art Crawl traffic jams, I’m almost grateful that the damnable fog kept me housebound for the night.

Svava Thordis Juliusson, Horizon Orange, 2010.

Curated by Ola Wlusek, An Early Winter brings together three regional artists whose practices are particularly well suited to the rough, unfinished space at 118 James Street North - formerly The Friendship Shop where I used to buy my bootlegged anime on VHS as a teenager, and more recently a nexus of September’s Supercrawl.

Even before examining the seductive chill that predominates the featured works themselves, it bears noting that it is physically, viscerally cold in the space, an uninhabited shell’s lack of heating conspiring with a sharp wind through the open door that kept me huddled in my coat for the duration of my visit. While normally an inconvenience of viewing art in unconventional settings, the brisk climate here contributes to the atmosphere of the exhibition, merging with Hamilton-based sound artist and composer Eric Powell’s Thicket (2010) to create the otherworldly tremor of viewing art at the latter end of an understated nuclear winter. Powell’s four channels of looped audio echo organically from the rafters with a composition of sounds that are sometimes industrial, sometimes evocative of nature but skilfully merged as music that lures the viewer past the spotlit placement of visual work and into the former shop’s darkened margins; the presence of Thicket in the space expands the parameters of the exhibition into the full cavernous potential of the space.

Sarah Kernohan, in-scape, 2009. Pen and ink on paper.

From a distance, Sarah Kernohan’s in-scape is an inscrutable white scroll of paper, partially washed out by a framing string of lights that I’m fairly certain are remnants of the afore-mentioned Supercrawl bash. Their adornment of Kernohan’s thirty-foot drawing is unnecessary given the minimal elegance of the Kitchener-based artist’s deft linework. Varying darknesses of fine pen and ink dance across a vast white space as though tracing a meandering path across topographies that derive from familiar sources and motives - the study of nature, the fluidity of the human psyche - yet achieve a sharper resolution than what is normally taken from these tactics.

Svava Thordis Juliusson, Hrísla (and the) ceaseless commerce with earth and air, 2010

Between Kernohan’s singular quiet statement and Powell’s discrete sound intervention, Svava Thordis Juliusson’s intricate constructions of found materials - predominantly plastics - set the dominant aesthetic of An Early Winter. Her densely layered clouds of gathered materiality share a subtle formal lineage with some of the prickly spikes in Kernohan’s drawing but take that language away into its own folkloric territory. According to the accompanying text, Hrísla (and the) ceaseless commerce with earth and air bears an ‘unintended resemblance to the ash cloud from Eyjafjallajökull’, the Icelandic volcano that wreaked havoc across the northern hemisphere in April 2010, but its near-human scale and composition of roots as fine as human capillaries brings this caccoon-like object unsettlingly closer to home, like a dormant body awaiting transformation. With a near-pagan touch of ritual, Juliusson’s choice of plastic ties to secure the whole mass together are delicately beaded like ornaments, or drops of frost.

Svava Thordis Juliusson, Svona, 2008 (on left)

With a similar nod to primordial mythic impulses, Svona - a graceful sweep of white plastic ties whose Icelandic title roughly translates as “this way” - finds a fitting dichotomy in the seemingly untitled work to its left. Bristling black brambles of plastic ties hover against a slick red sheet that bulges at the intersection of wall and floor, as though concealing a secret; it is an unabashedly erotic work towards which the tip of Svona’s wing seems to arch as though in temptation.

The angelic heft that transforms the crude matter of Svona is unmistakable, with enough sharp barbs emerging from its mass to carry the threat of the divine. The dark figurative stain that grounds the sculpture against the brick wall contributes to the fanciful read of something that, in a traditional white-cube gallery, could be taken as mere minimalist exercise. Whether deliberately added to the wall or an existing accident of decay (similar dark stains litter these walls, but none are so suggestive as this), the idea of a body burned away lends its power to these works, conjuring new mythologies from common plastic and a chilled, highly charged space of seeming nothingness.

Update: An Early Winter closes this weekend, but is still open for viewing on Friday November 19th, 7-9pm and Saturday November 20, 2-6pm with Sarah Kernohan in attendance on Saturday.

Share This

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Friday Links: Play
• » Friday Links: History Lessons

• BROWSE / IN Drawing Exhibitions Hamilton Art Sculpture Sound Art
• « Review Recycling: David Hoffos at MOCCA
• » The Beard