Akimblog
Hamilton
Matthew Walker | Clarissa Inglis at You Me Gallery | Fierce: Women's Hot-Blooded Film/Video at the McMaster Museum of Art | Simon Glass, Terence Byrnes, and david merritt at the Art Gallery of Hamilton
posted by Stephanie Vegh - March 3rd, 2010.
Commanding the centermost urban artery in the heart of downtown Hamilton, the James North Art Crawl has become the city’s most widely recognized cultural destination. Home to some of Hamilton’s most established artist-run centres as well as its newest experimental spaces, the unpredictable variety of this street’s art is a key part of its appeal to an ever-growing audience.
Matthew Walker, sketch for aural sculpture, 2009, charcoal on paper (photo: Matthew Walker.)
As urban revitalization is still very much in progress here, noteworthy art can sometimes be found in surprisingly rough settings. Despite a shuttered existence since the 1970s, the former Ginza Café at 133 James Street North was open in all its retro-derelict glory for a one-night showing by Matthew Walker. Drawings for LMP Series follow the Banff-based artist’s recent residency in Nebraska and document ideas for new landscape-driven sculpture in meticulously finished forms. Far from functioning as mere studies, his laboriously layered charcoal drawings resonate with the ambiguous potential found in unfinished spaces such as this.
Clarissa Inglis, Go Forth and Multiply, 2010 (photo: Bryce Kanbara.)
Further down James Street North, Clarissa Inglis has mounted her own elaborate solo installation at You Me Gallery. Go Forth and Multiply is also the result of travel, in her case to Mexico and Central America where the prevalent religiosity of the region loaned a Roman Catholic flavour to the artist’s selection of mass-produced objects. From the mindlessly proliferating sheep in the gallery window to a lively Eden twisted through with toy snakes, Inglis undermines patriarchal dogma from a sublimated yet unapologetically feminine stance.
Allyson Mitchell, Menstrual Hut Sweet Menstrual Hut, 2008-ongoing, multi-media installation
Fierce: Women’s Hot-Blooded Film/Video is another explicitly feminist project. Curated by Janice Hladki at the McMaster Museum of Art, the exhibition brings together film and video from Maureen Bradley, Dana Claxton, Allyson Mitchell and b.h. Yael. Faced with the challenge of this staggering canon of recent Canadian video art, works that offer a more immersive viewing experience inevitably leave the most memorable impression, from the delicately poised violence of Dana Claxton’s Buffalo Bone China to the literal camp setting of Allyson Mitchell’s Menstrual Hut Sweet Menstrual Hut. Even when screened in rotation as part of the show’s two viewing stations, Mitchell’s tongue-in-cheek concoctions take the greatest advantage of the raw aesthetic so firmly espoused by this collective thesis. Despite approaches that cut widely from political documentary to personal diary, many of these film works sidestep the professed ferocity of the curatorial theme in favour of enigmatic reticence, too secretive to speak as loudly as they should.
Simon Glass, forgives iniquity…, 2001, silver print
As the new Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Melissa Bennett (formerly of Gallery 44 in Toronto) has begun to express her special interest in photography through two of her numerous exhibitions. Highlighting a recent AGH acquisition, Simon Glass’ The Thirteen Attributes of God is a starkly delicate depiction of Judaic liturgy rendered in silver gelatin prints, their individual passages of Hebrew text spaced out like breaths. In viewing the photographs on their delineated path from right to left, the intimate details of human lips and dead birds’ feet demand close reading and invite contemplation of an abstracted mode of spirituality.
Terence Byrnes, Jones Family in living room on East, near Selma, 2008, inkjet print
There is a similarly timeless grace in Terence Byrnes’ collected images of the residents of Springfield, Ohio that has little to do with the impressive duration of his project, dating back to his student days in 1966. Contrary to Glass’ divine detachment, the quasi-religious rigor of End of the American Road is rooted in the emphatic dignity afforded to the uniquely real personalities in these portraits. Many of the works exude equal measures of poverty and pride in the face of Byrnes’ non-judgmental lens.
david merritt, sham, 2010, installation view (photo: Mike Lalich.)
The most compelling of Bennett’s curatorial contributions, david merritt: sham, conjoins title and verse from countless pop songs in the artist’s schoolgirl-perfect cursive script, weaving an internal logic that tangles with the viewer’s personal recollections of all these familiar tunes. When suspended in their graphite clouds, these word-drawings echo the reversal of his process in untitled (rope), an unraveled sisal rope that transforms itself into a sheltering tree-like form, hovering a tantalizing inch off the ground through no means other than its own disparate threads anchored to the ceiling. The pull of this piece is repeated in merritt’s other uses of rope, perhaps most tellingly in untitled (you’ve lost that), a wall-mounted mandala of rope fibres concealing delicate threads of words. Merely formal at a distance, an achingly poetic quality is revealed in the almost accidental sighting of words like “your lips” tangled in its dense mass.
The exhibition elaborates widely upon merritt’s practice – arguably too widely to act as a cohesive whole. Smaller works, such as a subtle floor projection tucked into the corner, are compelling in themselves but difficult to reconcile with the dominant drawings and sculptures. One senses the artist striving to make his voice heard in this large gallery, seemingly unaware that the cavernous space would have carried a quiet echo with even greater strength.
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.
You Me Gallery: http://www.youmegallery.ca/
Clarissa Inglis: Go Forth and Multiply continues until March 7.
McMaster Museum of Art: http://www.mcmaster.ca/museum/
Fierce: Women’s Hot-Blooded Film/Video continues until March 27.
Art Gallery of Hamilton: http://www.artgalleryofhamilton.com/
Simon Glass: The Thirteen Attributes of God continues until April 11.
Terence Byrnes: The End of the American Road continues until May 24.
david merritt: sham continues until May 24.