- James North Art Crawl: February
One of the unspoken tensions of the Art Crawl is the extent to which the event revolves around spaces rather than their contents. There is a predictable assortment of galleries along the street that establish an art crawler’s routine more than the prospect of the art itself (if only because oftentimes the exhibitions are poorly […]
- Professional Practice Postscript: On the spending and making of money
A lot of things about the explosion of debate around Vantage Art Projects’ Gatekeepers call continue to bother me. The tone of the discussion often ignored its own rationality in favour of kneejerk name-calling, and the lessons learned seem to be selective. Case in point: Vantage did show concern enough to revise the terms of […]
- White cats and black humour: suicide as farce
Among my less-than-glowing observations of this month’s Art Crawl, few have lingered in my mind the last few days save for a comment left on the post by a fellow art crawler who took issue with Laura Paolini’s exhibition Hello, Schrodinger? at Hamilton Artists Inc. My preoccupation is certainly not with his negative impression of […]
- James North Art Crawl: August
This month’s Art Crawl followed something of a bizarro-world format - not just because I actually managed to make it out for the August crawl this year, but because a variation in plans caused my standard gallery tour to flow in reverse. My traveling companion’s girlfriend happens to be the cousin of Bryce Huffman, so […]
- James North Art Crawl Preview: August
Hamilton Artist’s Inc: While the gallery is technically closed for the month of August (as is The Print Studio, so you’ll have to go to Wild Orchid for your sangria), their doors will be open during Art Crawl for WABAM!, a presentation of the Hamilton Youth Arts Network in collaboration with the Inc. The group […]
- James North Art Crawl: July
For the second month running, I’ve got another paid-writing deadline conflicting with my (unpaid, obviously) Art Crawl ritual, which accounts for this repeated lateness. It also probably explains the HTML markup that keeps sneaking into the in-progress Word document of my review for Sarah Anne Johnson’s House on Fire - maybe this multi-tasking rubbish isn’t […]
- Thoughts on Honeybees
The same day I was in Toronto doing my last-minute viewing at MKG127, I also had the chance to catch Adrianne Rubenstein’s first solo show at Board of Directors. I had previously viewed her earlier drawings in a group show at the same gallery and was appropriately blown away by her tangled compositions of colour-shifting […]
- Play Nice: 2009 Summa Show at Mac
Having spent a good many Thursdays of late attending critiques with the upper years of McMaster’s Studio Art program, I was very much looking forward to seeing what this year’s graduates would present at the always-packed-but-seldom-boring Summa Exhibition at the McMaster Museum of Art. Between those crits and various of their showings as Show and […]
- James North Art Crawl: February
This blog entry owes something of a debt to the cold medication that’s been working to keep me relatively lucid through the better part of this week as well as the weekend’s ragged aftermath of having attended the Art Crawl in this condition. I probably would have given this month’s Crawl a pass, save for […]
- Friday Night Happenings
As much as it feels like a betrayal of The Cause, in all likelihood I will not be attending the James North Art Crawl tonight as I will be away in Toronto for the opening of Mis[place]d: Animals Lost and Found at XPACE. But only because I have work in that show, namely ‘The Plagues’ […]




