Teri Donovan at Hamilton Artists Inc.
- Until Aug. 14, 155-161 James St. N., Hamilton ( www.hamiltonartistsinc.on.ca)
Hamilton is the new Brooklyn.
Hamiltonians will probably throttle me for the comparison. Hamilton, they argue, is already Hamilton - it does not need to remodel itself on another city. They're right, and the fear of a too-fast, Starbucks-on-every-corner gentrification is well grounded. "We're not going to be the clean-up crew for an H&M outlet," one artist alerted me. "We'd rather have boarded up windows."
However, the parallels between the two cities are unavoidable. Brooklyn is booming as an arts hub because Manhattan is unaffordable for artists. Toronto is in severe danger of out-pricing its own creative types. Hamilton, with its cheap rents and supportive arts community, looks better with each visit. And it's full of great art.
My first stop, at artist-run centre Hamilton Artists Inc., proved the long, hot car ride was worth enduring. But I'd ride twice as far for new works by painter Teri Donovan.
Half-Life, Donovan's new suite of figurative works depicting young girls and not-so-young women surrounded, if not engulfed, by layers of peeling wallpaper, is a haunting study of the transition from innocent and apprehensive childhood to knowing and resigned adulthood.
With an obvious nod to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 proto-feminist novella The Yellow Wallpaper - a story wherein a wife, confined to her room, is driven to madness by the patterns on her wallpaper (and, of course, by being confined to her room) - Donovan presents two sets of arch, melancholy works wherein transitory, mysterious facial expressions are juxtaposed against relentless but stationary wallpaper patterns. Our faces, Donovan argues, are as prone to becoming caught in matrixes of identity and consciousness as wallpaper is prone to redundancy.
The portraits of young girls that make up half the exhibition all convey a kind of frozen hesitancy. The girls stare up at the viewer, apparently estranged from the moment, their faces about to change expression; perhaps to burst into tears, perhaps to forget whatever is in front of them. The mood swings of a child have rarely been captured so well in paint.
Meanwhile, the adult women portrayed all seem too aware, to the point of cynicism. Staring straight at the viewer, defiant yet tired and bored, these ladies (in gloves and ball gowns, no less) have obviously been around and could tell a story or five. The learning curves Donovan's women have endured, in the years between babyish cotton sundresses and married-off satins, hang thickly in the air, a palpable absence.
Literary meta-texts aside, Donovan is one hell of an energetic painter. Layering encaustics over paints, Mylar beside digital scans and handmade paper, fancy stencilling next to abrupt, violent brush strokes, Donovan creates seductive surfaces that jump out at the viewer and then, like Gilman's yellow wallpaper, draw the eyes in, deeper and deeper.
Hamilton Artists Inc. is in the process of moving from its narrow gallery into a larger, multipurpose facility. Here's hoping they bring back Donovan, as her complex works deserve a more airy space.
Michel Proulx at You Me Gallery
- Until Aug. 8, 330 James St. N., Hamilton ( www.youmegallery.ca)
Michel Proulx photographs twinkling, mutable bodies of water the way National Geographic photographers capture tropical birds - up close, and in full, deep colour.
His new exhibition, A Week at Rice Lake, is culled from hundreds of photographs taken of said lake, at all hours of the day and night. The results are almost unbelievable: such rich blues - denim, cobalt, blow torch - and no end of variations on sunset red, from Chinese-lantern-like scarlet to dirty orange, to rusty brown.
Proulx's display technique is atypical of art photography. He prints his digital files onto tough signage vinyl, and then gives each print a coat of clear laminate. As Proulx told me, "The works are so durable, you can hang them outside, and you can wash them with soap and water!"
How strange, this jarring collision of fleeting images and super sturdy materials. At times, Proulx's beer-banner presentation strategy makes one pay slightly less attention to the glistening waterscapes he captures so attentively - but this is a minor quibble. Most people will be happy to marvel at Proulx's rushing tides of radiant, displaced light.
Brendan Fernandes at the Art Gallery of Hamilton
- Until Oct. 3, 123 King St. W., Hamilton ( www.artgalleryofhamilton.com)
Brendan Fernandes is a hot, rising art star. His multimedia exhibition at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, entitled, in lower case, until we fearless, will give you all sorts of reasons to agree with his near-celebrity status, plus much more to think about.
Reworking African-themed decorative tropes in a diverse range of media (animal sculptures, spear murals, flickering mask animations, dub/spoken word sound art), Fernandes gleefully opens up that eternally bountiful can of beans known as the postcolonial dialogue. But Fernandes appears more interested in the décor than the actual diaspora - or, rather, he wants us to think about the diasporic experience by re-contextualizing the West's appropriation of African motifs. It's hard to tell.
In one room, the faces of decoy deer, the kind used by hunters, are obscured by cheap plastic "African masks," the kind you can find in too many dollar stores. The masks have been repainted in chalk white (hello, metaphor!). In another room, simple black and white cartoons of animals hunting play in loops, on monitors mounted on tree-trunk like tubes. Each cartoon is paired with an a cappella version of a fitting pop song - for instance, a cheetah chomps on a gazelle's neck, accompanied by a breathy version of Smokey Robinson's You've Really Got a Hold on Me (hello again, metaphor!).
Obviously, Fernandes is challenging outdated Western ideas about "wild Africa," and he is very clever at applying new technologies to antiquated ideologies, at updating the ridiculous.
But one question bothered me throughout this exhibition: Does anybody really still think of Africa, of the many Africa(s), in terms of a 1950s Tarzan movie?
Does Fernandes actually believe his audience is that stupid, and thus needs to be taught obvious lessons? Or is he making fun of a former reality, our old ideas? Whatever the answers, until we fearless needs more addressing, not just dressing, of the issues it raises with such witty aplomb.