The Hamilton Art Boom

Here are two articles about the contemporary art boom in my hometown of Hamilton, Ontario. I'm very proud to see that this is happening after so many years of being, well, frankly embarrassed of being a Hamiltonian. I remember when the Globe article was released; 900 CHML, the local radio station, was abuzz. People were talking -- not just art students and the cultural elite, but your average steel worker and nurse. Many Hamiltonians may not understand contemporary art, but I know that the vast majority are proud that we finally have something to boast about after economic downturns, a failing downtown, expanding suburbia and always being the butt of the joke. (We're one of the top ten largest cities in Canada, yet national news will still say "Hamilton, an hour outside of Toronto..." like the listener has no idea where we are.)

Go West, Young Artist

But don't stop on Queen Street. The scene to check out these days is happening in Hamilton

BRUCE FARLEY MOWAT

Special to The Globe and Mail

HAMILTON, ONT. -- On a Friday night, Hamilton's old inner-city neighbourhood of Jamesville is overflowing with art lovers: Over at the Print Studio, a middle-aged woman from Etobicoke is inquiring about its workshops after viewing an exhibit by local printmaker Emily Brown. Down the street at the Blue Angel Gallery, a group of twentysomethings sits in on an improv theatre performance. Across the street, near the corner of Cannon, a crowd of moms, dads and grads gather at the Loose Canon Gallery for a group exhibition of emerging artists in the McMasterUniversity art program. It's a scene that happens every six weeks or so, when the galleries of Jamesville synchronize their opening nights. When the night is over, 250 to 300 people will have passed through the doors of each gallery.

You might expect to see something like this in Toronto or Montreal. The fact that it's happening in Hamilton, though, may qualify as a small miracle. In the once-sleepy Jamesville district -- the area in and around James Street North from Wilson Street to an old railway station -- seven galleries have sprung up over the past two years, with more expected to open soon. Out-of-town artists have begun making inquiries. Some Toronto artists, such as Robert Carley and Andrew McPhail, have already relocated to the SteelCity.

"I think this is a sign that Hamilton may very well be -- finally -- culturally maturing," says David Liss, a Hamilton expatriate and the curator of Toronto's Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. "What's exciting about it is this thing sprung up organically. It didn't start at a boardroom. It has the ring of authenticity."

It's a textbook example of how the arts can revitalize an anemic neighbourhood, but it didn't happen overnight. Most of the SteelCity's current high-profile artistic alumni -- including Mr. Liss and artist Floria Sigismondi -- became known to the public after they left the confines of their hometown. Artists who choose to remain in the area are, understandably, a tenacious lot, forced by necessity to rely on self-built support mechanisms.

Hamilton Artists Inc., as one of the first artist-run co-operatives in Canada, initially opened its doors in the neighbourhood in 1975. In its 30-plus-year history, "The Inc." has moved around to several locations, but always remained in the neighbourhood.

"Artists have traditionally always established themselves in low-rent areas," the co-operative's current program director, Steve Mazza, says by way of explanation. "But we're not trying to compete with anyone, or align ourselves with whatever's currently in vogue."

The growth of the current strip of galleries really began with the May, 2003, opening of the You Me Gallery, which specializes in work by Hamilton area and Japanese-Canadian artists. The gallery is curated by one of the original members of the Inc., Bryce Kanbara.

"I began this gallery project as a way to express my disenchantment with the public art system -- which mostly supports its own infrastructure [of] directors, curators, educators, fundraisers and a small number of select artists," says Mr. Kanbara, who graduated from McMasterUniversity in 1970.

But for most galleries on the strip, Jamesville has become the choice of locale for their new ventures for two main reasons: the cheap real estate and the combined presence of Mr. Kanbara and the Inc. Another factor that has spurred the growth of the parallel-gallery system in Hamilton was the establishment in 2004 of a gallery intern program as part of McMasterUniversity's fine arts program. The program has effectively hooked up the university art community with the downtown scene.

The area's collective energy shows no sign of letting up. Retail outlets, such as Mixed Media, an art supply store run by H Magazine editor Dave Devries-Kuruc, are popping up. The Hamilton Media Arts, an artist-run new media collective, opens its new gallery space, The Factory, next month. And unlike most major centres, this district is solidly anchored: The majority of gallery owners own the buildings they work in -- something unheard of in today's Toronto or Vancouver.

All of this activity looks very familiar and very encouraging to Mr. Liss, who has seen the Parkdale neighbourhood in Toronto begin a similar turnaround.

"In the States, you see this kind of thing happening in places like Pittsburgh or Seattle, because the major centres are getting too expensive for artists. I think the same thing is happening in Hamilton, and I'd like to see the city, for once, nurture it."

Opening soon

Superstition be damned: This Friday the 13th will feature a confluence of openings in Jamesville. The main space of Hamilton Artists Inc. (3 Colbourne St., http://www.hamiltonartistsinc.on.ca) presents Totem, an exhibition by emerging artist Cathy Cahill featuring a selection of her whimsical, towering faux-fur animal totem poles. Ingrid Mayrhofer, a curator at the McMaster Museum of Art, will be showing her work Rapunzel, an installation piece featuring two- and three-dimensional elements. Both exhibitions open at 8 p.m.

Half a block north, the You Me Gallery (330 James St. N., http://www.youmegallery.ca) is kicking off a new year of programming with "Pictures of me when I was younger" or, "Ok, they're lamps", Brian Kelly's rambling suite of illuminated, found-object sculpture. Mr. Kelly forages the world for parts, but lives in Dundas, Ont. The show opens at 7 p.m.

The usual terminus for local art crawls, The Blue Angel Gallery (243 James St. N., http://www.blueangelgallery.ca), is featuring its weekly Friday night combination of visual arts, music, performance, poetry and open stage.

-- Bruce Farley Mowat

Steeltown Revisited

By: Bert Archer

Toronto Life, September, 2008

How do you know when Toronto is too expensive to be hip? When artists move to Hamilton. Our high-priced real estate is fuelling a growing exodus down the QEW. And it’s an entirely different migration from moving to the burbs. Hamilton – with it’s downtown-centred 19th-century layout, industrial heritage and fiery smokestacks – is as urban as it gets. Though it’s uneasily close to Toronto, it is not a satellite; it has an orbit of its own.

Writer Sky Gilbert and his partner, artist and curator Ian Jarvis, moved in 2003. “We couldn’t afford a house in Toronto,” he says, “and we wanted a charming old Victorian in a downtown core.” He found his house, just off the now burgeoning gallery strip of James Street North, for $90,000. “Hamilton does not smell,” he says. “It’s a beautiful ex-steel town. It’s very much like Baltimore or Queens – the little diamond in the rough beside the money-coloured ice palaces of the big city.”

Andrew McPhail, a 47-year old Toronto artist and long-time anchor of the Toronto gallery scene, moved in 2005. “We sold our house in Riverdale and bought a three-bedroom 1894 home here for $150,000, slightly less than a third of our Toronto house’s selling price.” As a result of the windfall, both he and his boyfriend, a former social worker, have retired.

At least one big developer is betting on the Richard Florida revitalization-through-the-creative-class effect. Harry Stinson, the original force behind the Candy Factory, which kick-started Toronto’s loft conversion boom, was all but run out of town after his One-King West project fell apart. He’s in negotiations to buy Hamilton’s Royal Connaught Hotel (which has been vacant for the past four years) and turn it into a condo-shopping complex.

Jim Chambers, founder of what became Gallery TRW and one of the forces behind the birth of West Queen West as a gallery district, has bought and sold three homes since moving six years ago. “I feel like a kid in a candy store, “he says. His latest purchase was a five-bedroom, three-storey detached Georgian Revival home built in 1890, which he picked up in July for less than $100,000. “Quite aside from the price difference,” Chambers says, “when neighbourhoods like Queen West get too expensive, they lose the qualities that made artists want to live there in the first place.”

For Hamilton, rampant gentrification is a way off. The city is still resolutely working class, and the James Street strip full of vacant storefronts, dollar stores and bars caters to what Chambers refers to as Hamilton’s broken people. Since the commute’s a bitch – and will remain so at least until the city gets its own VIA stop, plus expanded GO train service in 2010 – for the moment, Hamilton is for people who want to be Hamiltonians, and a bargain hunter’s paradise.

Links:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Creative-Class-Hamilton

Fine 319: Gerhard Richter and the Cologne Cathedral

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Gerhard Richter, born in 1932, is a contemporary German artist that primarily works in the medium of painting. Many of his works are a reaction to photography; he will project a photographic image on his canvas, trace it out and paint it in accurate colours, and then manipulate the still-wet pigments with soft brushes and squeegees. The results are images that look very similar to photographic blurs, while showing the artist's hand and revealing the nature of the paint itself. His manipulation of wet paint extends to his abstract works, where he paints many layers of colours on a canvas and scrapes it away, revealing the many layers underneath and blurring the colours together.

In 1974, he produced a series of canvases which explore colour. Similar to the works of Ellsworth Kelly, he painted squares of pure colour of a huge breadth of shades and hues in a grid formation, randomly arranged. The result looks like a pixelated image:

4096 Colours (1974)

"4096" is, of course, 16x16x16, and is the hexidecimal system of colours, used in computers.

30 years later, he was commissioned to replace the glass in the Cologne Cathedral's main window; during the Second World War, its stunning stained glass was shattered during Allied bombings of the city. This is what he delivered:

From the NY Times:

an abstract composition of 11,500 identically sized units — at 14.5 square inches each, they are frequently compared to pixels — in 72 colors, the arrangement of which was determined randomly by a computer program. Richter originally produced two drafts for the window, each portraying the Nazi execution of innocents. But he ultimately concluded that “figurative” was something he simply could not do. “I was not able to make something of it,” he says. Any representational image would have been tiresomely dissected for meanings religious, political, symbolic. There were also more mundane reasons. As the cathedral’s master builder, Barbara Schock-Werner, writes in a catalog essay for the window, “How could such a depiction be realized other than in gloomy, oppressive colors?” This was not a frivolous matter of interior decoration but a practical concern: the prismatic 1,200-square-foot window would bathe the cathedral (and congregation) in a significant amount of light.

So Richter, who provided the work as a gift, ultimately settled on a design inspired by his 1974 work “4,096 Colors” — one in a series of abstract color-field paintings he has worked on in various forms since 1966. About his process he noted: “I had the shape of the cathedral window, and I laid it on a color-field painting, and I said: ‘My God! Fantastic.’ I thought, This is the only thing.” Still, he did nod to architectural history, coordinating his palette with the existing windows — anemic hues were avoided — and forcing his modernist grid to submit to the Gothic tracery. The result is a mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic blend of technology and tradition.

I must say I'm quite glad that he limited his palate. But my feelings for the piece are mixed -- something I find odd, because I love his other works and tend to have a fiery passion for abstraction. On one hand, I feel the piece is inappropriate for the space. A majestic Gothic cathedral, full of skilled details, next to a randomly generated image from a computer. The juxtaposition of skill is jarring, and (dare I say it?) reveals Richter's work as lazy. I'm also not sure if the shapes themselves complement the curved lines of the building. It almost hits of an obnoxiousness of minimalism: "I can get away with doing barely anything".

But then I thought about it. I imagined the light shining through in a kaleidoscopic rainbow, bathing me in coloured light as I gaze up. These stained glass windows are to inspire a sort of awe; the beauty of nature, of light, of colour, that God gave us. The beauty of His creation. Richter forces us to view his composition not as a composition, but simply as colour and light. It is pure. It doesn't need the artists' hand: even at random, it is beautiful. Richter is a man of few words, but I wouldn't want him to say anything about the piece. Like the skilled tradesmen that created the original stained glass window, he should not take any authorship of this piece. The credit goes to God, and his splendour of colour and light -- and I'm an atheist.

Fine 319: Richard Serra/Before the Post-

Richard Serra's One Ton Prop thrills me. I've always liked the concept of the sublime, and I think that this piece really captures it in a very simple way. No illusion of gazing off a cliff: simply four pieces of sheet metal (of course, it's Serra) that are barely balancing off of one another. This thing could fall on you if you got too close. J'adore.

But then we have the debacle regarding his 1981 piece Tilted Arc. Reading up on this, it got me thinking: a lot of Serra's public works are ugly. Not even sublime... just flat-out ugly. Of course that's besides the point --not even the point-- but it doesn't surprise me that a lot of people weren't on his side when the courts were debating the piece's removal. We're supposed to contemplate the 'thingness of the thing'. But what happens when the thing itself is ugly?

Compare this to Cloud Gate in Chicago. People love Anish Kapoor's 2004 sculpture; always taking pictures of it, surrounding it, laughing at it, hugging it. The difference between these pieces is the difference between Minimal Art and Post-Minimalism.

Minimal Art revelled in the ready-made, the factory-shipped, the found, the boring, and the sublime. Post-Minimalism takes stripped-down, clean aesthetics and transforms it into something else: rather than dogmatically avoiding any references or any notion of beauty, many of these Post-Minimalists have no fear of fixing something up to make it look better, or even alluding to the outside world. Cloud Gate was painstakingly polished to remove any trace of its construction, creating this otherworldly magical bean that seems to have fallen out of the sky. Its surface distorts images and creates a void, recalling metaphysical or spiritual ideas. People come up with all sorts of theories about what it "means" -- something that I'm sure many Minimal artists would be horrified at.

I've just started to read Lyotard's Post-modern Condition, and this evolution from the minimal to the post-minimal strangely recalls some of his theories of post-modernity. Minimal Art seemed to have a dogma, something that the Post-minimalists have shunned. Does this represent part of the post-modern rejection of absolutism and the embracing of pluralism? Hmm!

Fine 319: More Chairs

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One Hundred Spaces, 1997

Oh, Rachel Whiteread: how I adore thee. I love how she deals with spaces that we often ignore. It's melancholy and curious. Looking at these negative casts of the spaces underneath chairs, I feel like a child who has crawled under the furniture to hide from the world while giggling, listening to the adult conversations above and believing that no one knows we're there.

Whiteread's ability to deal with the forgotten extends from the playful to the poignant. I think the most accessible piece for wide audiences would be her Holocaust Memorial, Nameless Library. Revealed in 2000 in the Judenplatz in Vienna, it is a reference to the People of the Book, book burnings, and the plethora of knowledge that was wiped out by the Nazis -- a library that we will never have access to again.

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Fine 319: IKB

Go here.

What a fabulous website!

Hex Triplet of IKB: #002FA7

RGB: (0, 47, 167)

HSV: (223', 100%, 65%)

Dry pigment in a synthetic resin

--> Ultramarine

[And blue urine the next day.]

Staring out Into the Void. What a wonderful dream of sky.

Fine 319: Madmoiselle

Joseph Beuys: I wonder if Lacan was a lagomorph.

Rrose Sélavy: How preposterous.

JB: Would you like some sugar in your tea?

RS: *achoo!*

JB: Oh, may God bless America.

RS: Danke. & oui, señor. Two lumps. Shall you have some in yours?

JB: No, I have some honey here for me.

(An urban oak forest begins to sprout along the road. They drink out of gold tea cups.)

RS: What are your feelings on Wagner?

JB: He was probably a virgin, but with an animalistic urge. I heard he enjoyed wrapping himself in fat and felt.

What a lovely tea party.

Fine 319: Moira Roth

Way back in high school, I was on the path to become a scientist -- but then I discovered Marcel Duchamp. Doing some research on Encarta 2002 (which was brand new at the time!) on some topic I don't even remember, I came across his name. "Du-champ? Who's that?" So I clicked on the name. Behold! A urinal!

Well, I was hooked from the beginning. After reading a few paragraphs, an epiphany occurred: "I get this." It was intuitive. Indeed, why must art be pretty? There is simply no need for it. Why can't an artist declare a urinal a piece of art, if he says so? Over a few short months, I read everything I could about Dadaism. As I said, I was hooked.

Fast forward a few years, and I'm a science student at UW. For my birthday, my (ex-)boyfriend bought me a book: Differece/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. By this point, I was getting pretty sick of science, and found myself constantly on the internet, reading about art and culture... but I had never actually picked up a book. It all changed with this! A collection of essays, interviews and diary entries, Roth muses on the connection between Duchamp and Cage, as well as their impact on her research. Roth's expertise is on feminist and performance art -- areas very much influenced by Duchamp.

Coming across the various artists in Fine 319, I'm often thinking about the influence of Duchamp and Cage. So much so that I think I need to pull this book out again. I enjoy Moira Roth's writing style: very little jargon, very personal, and just a great read. I haven't looked up any of her other works since; perhaps there are some recommendations out there?