- James North Art Crawl: May
Because this month’s Art Crawl review is longer than most, I won’t go on at length with any preamble except to say that something really peaked this time around - not only in the number of venues to take in, but also in the overall quality of work to be enjoyed. As ever, discussing it […]
- Encounters: McMaster Summa 2011
The opening reception of McMaster University’s Summa exhibition of Studio Art graduates is always a crowded affair, and this year was no exception. Even with one of the most restrained selections of work that I’ve seen in recent years, the main floor galleries at the McMaster Museum of Art were so densely packed that it […]
- James North Art Crawl: July
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 […]
- Muse Me: 2010 Summa Show at the McMaster Museum of Art
With another April comes another group of graduates from McMaster University’s undergraduate Studio Art program. This year’s exhibition boasts a website that I found useful mainly for putting names to familiar student faces and not much else, given that there’s far more pixel dimensions devoted to photos of the artists than images of their work, […]
- James North Art Crawl: March
Despite the chilling sort of rain that half-tempted me to just stay in for the evening (to say nothing of a new episode of Caprica on Space), traffic at this month’s art crawl was going strong such that I spent the first twenty minutes circling the neighbourhood in search of parking. Great for the crawl, […]
- 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 […]
