Akimblog
Hamilton
Judy Major-Girardin at transit gallery | Matthew Varey and Allyson Mitchell at the McMaster Museum of Art | Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Christina Sealey and Richard Oddie at the Art Gallery of Hamilton
posted by Stephanie Vegh - March 5th, 2009.
I once had an awkward conversation with a well-meaning gentleman who unintentionally (I’m sure) compared an artistic life in Hamilton to living in a barn some unfathomable distance outside Saskatoon. Which is ridiculous, of course. Ecologically, Hamilton is nothing like the prairies, it’s more like a swamp - the land uncertain beneath your feet and a heady smell of rot in the air.
The thing about swamps is that their waters are inevitably swirling with nascent life and unpredictable depths. Which brings me around to Aqueous, Judy Major-Girardin’s solo exhibition of fused paintings and prints at transit gallery.
Judy Major-Girardin, Coalescence (diptych), 2009, dremel engraving on canvas with transparent gesso, oil and alkyd medium (photo: Priti Kohli and David Brace)
Major-Girardin (who, I should point out for disclosure’s sake, was my painting professor at McMaster) combines a printmaker’s love of surface relief with painterly suggestions of movement in the water below a pond’s surface. Inspired by the marshes at Point Pelee, her precise linear renderings of botanical forms float over and between layers illuminated by colours that both speak to nature and thrum with an acidic resonance.
Aqueous will have ended by the time this post goes live (so much for the immediacy of the internet), making way for a survey of recent paintings by Michael Allgoewer, Fiona Kinsella, Martin Pearce and Matthew Varey, the latter of whom is also currently showing his Building on History series at the his old alma mater, the McMaster Museum of Art. His oil-and-alkyd canvases depicting haunting black towers are slick monuments to modernity. The incongruity of Varey’s club-like sculpture encrusted with globs of paint sets up a striking contrast between his body of work and Allyson Mitchell’s rowdy Ladies Sasquatch in the neighbouring gallery.
Allyson Mitchell, Tawny with Bonfire and Familiars (photo: cat o’neil)
Mitchell’s bedazzling sasquatches follow a considerable lineage of works in which the artist crafts her highly socialized and sexualized creatures from fun-fur and shag carpet; this exhibition combines six of these proud, boisterous ladies in a camp congregation complete with bonfire and attendant pink critter-companions. The inclusion of diminutive dogs, squirrels and moles, let loose amongst the hulking bodies of these sasquatches, speaks to the welcome inherent in the work; despite their turning their formidable, third-wave feminist posteriors to the viewer, they are a friendly bunch and a sight well worth seeing in the fur and flesh.
Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Machines at Play, 2009, installation view (photo: Mike Lalich)
Equally engaging is Jean-Pierre Gauthier’s Machines at Play at the Art Gallery of Hamilton. Its awkward arabesque of steel tubing and electronics dominate the space and conjure up clattering sound with a motion detector like the instantaneous greeting of some overgrown, otherworldly puppy. Indeed, the work’s title, Rut, is more a reference to animal and insect mating sounds than the inescapable cycle implied by its never-ending linear shape, a repetition echoed in his Uncertainty Marker series of spindly robots dragging graphite sticks over the gallery walls. Like Rut, these works are motion activated and reveal the palpable consequences of the viewer’s proximity and preference by the variant darkness of each robot’s progressive drawing. Those most viewed have produced bold, heavy shadows compared to the faint traces left by others, like some Darwinian consequence of clapping if you believe in fairies.
By a fortunate coincidence, a group of young school children were touring the exhibition during my visit, keeping all the works perpetually busy. They especially enjoyed Gauthier’s motion-sensitive piano, Beats and Butterflies, and pushed its musical capabilities with clumsy Charlestons and sweeping waltzes (both at the same time) before trying to “trick” the piano’s sensors through a stratagem of tip-toeing, leaping and running very, very fast. After witnessing this entire debacle, I can safely say that the piano picks up everything and makes a great diversion for children besides.
Christina Sealey and Richard Oddie, Living Spaces: Imagining Hamilton, 2009, installation view (photo: Mike Lalich)
While Machines at Play is a touring exhibition from the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Living Spaces: Imagining Hamilton is locally curated by Sara Knelman and features the close-to-home observations of Hamilton artists Christina Sealey and Richard Oddie. This intimate exhibition reveals Hamilton’s inherent dichotomy as a post-industrial landscape harbouring green oases of unkempt woods with oil painted scenes cut through by contrasts between dark urban passages and expansive light. They depict Hamilton with a richness that belies the sparse staining of the canvas with the telling toxicity of the solvent’s trace.
Heavier renderings of people and patterns establish a rhythm in the paintings, carried further by the murmuring soundtrack of traffic and narrations playing in the space. The use of sound in the exhibition resonates with Oddie and Sealey’s collaborations as Orphx, their electro-acoustic project that will be performing in conjunction with this exhibition on March 19 at 7pm. Given the phenomenal performance I witnessed on the James North Art Crawl last spring, their unpredictable, evocative soundscapes will be well worth witnessing - a vital proof of life pulsing against the surface of these gallery walls.
Stephanie Vegh is a Hamilton-based artist and writer whose criticism has appeared in Scotland’s Map Magazine and various British and Canadian publications. She currently lives in Hamilton and serves on the Boards of Directors for Hamilton Artists Inc. and The Print Studio.
transit gallery: http://www.transitgallery.ca/
See website for current exhibitions.
Allyson Mitchell: Ladies Sasquatch continues until March 21.
Matthew Varey: Building on History continues until March 21.
Art Gallery of Hamilton: http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.com/
Jean-Pierre Gauthier: Machines at Play continues until May 18.
Christina Sealey and Richard Oddie: Living Spaces: Imagining Hamilton continues until May 18.