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Hamilton
Turn On at the Art Gallery of Hamilton | suckerpunch at Hamilton Artists Inc. | Fausta Facciponte and Matt Sparling at the McMaster Museum of Art
posted by Stephanie Vegh - June 18th, 2009.
With the entirety of its summer programming given over to all things Italian, the Art Gallery of Hamilton has deliberately set its sights beyond the boundaries of city and country to engage in a global conversation, one that is pushed to the forefront of the curatorial notes for Turn On: Contemporary Italian Art. Though the show aims to speak of urbanity’s dazzling bright lights as a universal language, it is the quiet moments that touch upon a vein of commonality.
Adrian Paci, film still from Turn On, 2004, DVD, (courtesy of the artist and francesca kaufmann, Milan)
Adrian Paci shows a photographic love of light with his modest slide show of outdated childhood portraits bursting with solar flares as prelude to Turn On,the short film that gives this show its title. As night falls over concrete steps in the Albanian city of the artist’s birth, work-worn men crank generators to sputtering, fume-exhausting life, feeding electricity into fragile glass bulbs. This is less a work of creating a glamorous nightlife than it is a private ritual of graven-faced men passed down from Dylan Thomas’ famous villanelle, aging fathers implored to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Patrick Tuttofuoco, Revolving Landscape (Canadian variation), 2009, steel, glass, plexiglass, paint, foam, fabric, neon
Conversely, Patrick Tuttofuoco’s Revolving Landscape (Canadian variation) is a neon-bright sculptural interpretation of far-off playgrounds such as Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The exotic quality of these exuberant cities is heightened by the contrast between their confident conclave and the outsider quality of Joe, the sixth sculpture in this assembly produced during Tuttofuoco’s residency in Hamilton. The simplistic large-scale mask, cast in an iridescent hangover-bile shade of yellow, references local steel welders and even a tease of hockey given the recent NHL hopes in the air these days. With its empty-socketed gaze fixed on the lively cityscapes of the other five works, Joe tries to capture part of the Hamilton psyche, but this interpretation is as hollow as the object itself.
Massimo Grimaldi, Fading Love, 2004, adhesive text (courtesy of artist and Zero…, Milan)
A more generous contribution to Turn On is Massimo Grimaldi’s text-based installations in the corridors of the AGH. Rendered in pale grey vinyl lettering on white walls, the free-flowing narratives play with pop clichés of love to create unexpected reflections that invite the personalized perspectives of passerby. As Grimaldi favours public spaces for his interventions, the piece found off-site on the exterior hoarding of Hamilton Artists Inc.’s soon-to-be-renovated premises on James Street North is the most effective of his five installations. Situated at a busy downtown intersection, the unabashedly free-flowing verse stalls pedestrians and drivers alike in their tracks, bringing a thoughtful pause to the sometimes-desperate pace of this post-industrial life.
Niki Boghossian, Defeated Heavybag, 2007, cotton wool, cotton batting, chain
Inside Hamilton Artists Inc.’s temporary gallery space is suckerpunch, an exhibition held in conjunction with the Hamilton Pride Festival that expands its edict to address wider notions of gender, athleticism, and power. The combative clash of sexual tropes is most successfully rendered in Niki Boghossian’s crochet sculptures of a boxing ring and punching bag, their soft bodies overexerted to the breaking point, bleeding threads of red yarn from ruptured seams with a violence that is playful on the surface while subverting both masculine sport and feminine craft.
Matthew Dayler, Untitled: Red, 2009, silk-screen and acrylic on board
Knitted fibres reverberate in the other two artists in suckerpunch, from the suggestively bulging excess of conjoined sports socks in Andrew McPhail’s not my fault! to the balaclavas worn by the model in Matthew Daylor’s pop-inflected restaging of F. Holland Day’s The Seven Words from 1898. The latter image references early obfuscations in gay photography when there was little separation between the desired male body and that of Christian martyrdom, and then translates that easy appropriation into a contemporary play on branding – note the ubiquitous white cord of an iPod – that blurs the edges of cultural identification.
Fausta Facciponte, Emma for $1.15, 2007, digital photograph mounted on plexiglass, archival pigment inks
Sharply contemporary photographic tropes are also apparent in the paired exhibitions at the McMaster Museum of Art. Both Fausta Facciponte and Matt Sparling exploit the potential of the modern camera lens as an evolutionary means of seeing, using digital technologies to fuse multiple close-up shots into large-scale composites that are uncannily intimate. Facciponte’s ersatz children, old plastic dolls, are sourced from garage sales and second-hand shops, signs of past use made explicit by the intensity of detail captured in scratched eyes and filaments of hair made larger than what is normally, comfortably perceived.
Matt Sparling, Railway Tracks, 2008, digital inkjet print
Similarly, Sparling’s panoramic landscapes in Crossroads stretch a passage of forgotten time across a visually impossible space; the image curves with a birds-eye lens distortion towards the edges of the frame, as though this dusty world with its sharp blades of grass is threatening to collapse back upon itself. The tension of seeing more than is permitted by the human eye lends a fantastic quality to Sparling’s narration of deals made with the devil at untold stages of history, while the digital virtuosity of the image launches the story into the realm of the hyperreal – a future with no cities in sight.
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.
Art Gallery of Hamilton: http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.on.ca/ex_current.php#4
Turn On continues until September 13.
Hamilton Artists Inc.: http://www.hamiltonartistsinc.on.ca/
suckerpunch continues until July 31.
Fausta Facciponte: Reliable continues until August 29.
Matt Sparling: Crossroads continues until August 29.