Two Photographs I Own, and One That I Do Not Own
Danny Custodio, Ships #13, c-print, 2013
The Portuguese and the Newfoundlanders may seem like strange bedfellows, but they’re not. Some historians believe that Portuguese mariners reached Newfoundland before John Cabot (a.k.a: Giovanni Cabotto), the Italian credited with the achievement of “discovering” the island in 1497. Traveling through Newfoundland, one is struck by Portuguese influence in names like Portugal Cove, Fogo Island and even Labrador, which comes from the Portuguese word for farmer. Portuguese Newfoundland cod fleets persisted in dory fishing until the 1960s, decades before the cod moratorium set shockwaves through the local economy. I am haunted by a story my father told me about a kindred spirit in his town two hours north of St. Johns, a “black sheep” named Don who was rumoured to be the illegitimate child of a woman from Brooks Cove and a Portuguese fisherman.
I’ve long admired the work of Danny Custodio, a St. Catherine’s (via Toronto)-based photographer whose earliest work involved domestic scenes of his family that served as quiet, moving expressions of Portuguese-Canadian culture and social class. This work won him a graduating medal from OCAD University. After buying Ships #13 for myself last December, I revisited this early work of his, which is now at least 10 years old. Reading Danny’s writing about it is amazing in how much it holds close some of the ideas inherent in my own work. I faintly remember how brave this work seemed ten years ago, against the backdrop of a city and an art scene that was, for the most part, too polite to talk about class-consciousness. Back then, identity politics were relegated to the cheap seats, far from first few rows of the arenas of both arts discourse and mainstream media, where they sit today.
Ships #13 shows a worker on a cargo ship on the Welland Canal, a stone’s throw from Hamilton. I took the photo to be framed across from Gage Park, and the framer really loved the picture. He found it amazing that the image looked like a combination of watercolour painting and a photograph because of the way the painted boat hull’s colour bled from the force of the boat’s movement, kind of like a smooth beach stone washed up in Costa Verde, or Salmon Cove, or Nickel Beach in Port Colborne. I love it too.
Ingrid Mayrhofer, Chairs, 2015
I was DJing a fundraiser at Hamilton Artists Inc. when I bought this. I was also drunk. Ingrid, if you’re reading this, please don’t take this as an insult-- the alcohol was just the exact lubrication my wallet needed.
Whenever I look at Chairs, other titles (works of non-fiction from my tenure working in a bookshop) come to mind: Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky, and an older one called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. These titles sum up the experiences of art programmers/cultural workers like Ingrid and I. Sometimes, it feels like we’re paid to set up and put back chairs for a living, over and over again. Sometimes the chairs are filled, but most often they’re not. Promote, rinse, repeat; new assembly line workers in the Experience Economy.
Ingrid explains the photographs in this series as:
“document(ing) objects in a state of rest, having served a purpose and no longer required. Some of the objects seem to be abandoned; others are simply stored for the season or put away indefinitely. [...] Having served as objects of leisure- time joy for their consumer/owner for a relatively brief time, these pieces of furniture or equipment now face an ambiguous existence in perpetuity.”
Stephen Brookbank, Kingston Road, Scarborough, Ontario (from the series East Side)
I may not own this photo, but I can tell you all about this place. When you walk in the back door, you are hit with the waft of garbage so strong you jog slightly down the narrow back corridor until you reach the elevator, yet the smell still lingers slightly. When you enter the elevator, and exit into the hall of the fourth floor, this smell is replaced by many others-- spaghetti sauce, the faint undertone of an unidentifiable spice used in West Indian cooking, Bounce dryer sheets and dusty sweat.
This building is full of children with jack-o-lantern smiles who run in and out of doors all day, giggling and gasping for air. Shaun lives in the townhouse across the driveway, Tessa and her sister Tracy in the next building on ten, and Vicki and her sister Sam live on eleven. Bernard’s father is a Policeman and Kevin’s father always has a pen in his blue shirt pocket, and dirty sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms. One night I stayed really late at Ashley and Dwayne’s house watching Dallas and their dad Roger fell asleep on the couch, farting and muttering in his sleep until the end credits rolled. Kevin and I used to play doctor. Ashley had a clubfoot. When I lost my first tooth at Bernard’s house and my gums bled all over my chin, Bernard cried and proclaimed at the top of his lungs “I LOVE YOU.”
Tara Bursey is an artist, independent curator and arts worker. She coordinates exhibitions and programs at the Workers Arts & Heritage Centre.
Shotgun review: Toronto Art Book Fair
When I first read of the inaugural Toronto Art Book Fair (TOABF) to be held at Artscape Youngplace (a former West Queen West public school turned gallery/studio/social enterprise complex), my heart immediately skipped a beat. Cue flooding memories of Scholastic Book Fairs: libraries teeming with 4’ high crowds, girls pouring over new releases from the Sweet Valley Twins, boys wrestling over crisp copies of Bunnicula, and me, pining for that bookmark with the little illustrated green olive, proclaiming “Olive You!” Admittedly, my 25+ year memory bank may be patchy and hyperbolic at best, but my point is this: take my lifetime of bibliophilia, peppered with elementary school nostalgia, and a deep appreciation for 90s throwback aesthetics – TOABF, you had me at “hello.”
The fair featured 75 vendor tables in hallways and classrooms on all four floors of the converted school, totalling over 150 independent artists across a range of print and self-publishing practices. Highlights among them were the stalwart proprietors of Toronto artist multiples, Paul & Wendy Projects, the cross-continental worker-owned print collective, Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and my new favourite zine-maker, Julia Arredondo of Vice Versa Press.
Julia Arredondo, Baltimore Breakups: A Popup Memoir, Vice Versa Press, 2014.
Vice Versa is a travelling print shop currently based out of Chicago by way of Baltimore and Corpus Christi, Texas. Arredondo’s handwritten and xeroxed Guide to – zines (Guide to Being Alone, Guide to Being Broke and Fabulous and my personal favourite, Guide to Dating Gangsters) provided a comical counterpoint to the fair’s tables upon tables of pensive and minimally typeset artist books. Gangsters is a two volume compendium, which Arredondo describes as her “first attempt at taking a semi-anthropological approach to dudes;” it covers the basics of dating all sects of gangster-type men from Traditional Thugs to Cat People, Inmates to Art School Kids. But it’s not all DIY-nostalgia and comic relief. Vice Versa’s newest release, Baltimore Breakups: A Pop-up Memoir, is at once both a heartfelt story and an object of wonder – 5 photocopy printed, hand cut and assembled pop-up pages, all saddle stitch bound – chronicling a city of love and heartbreak, complete with a brand new bevy of hoodlums and thugs.
I didn’t have time to attend the fair’s robust speaker series, but was just as happy to traverse the hallways and flip the pages uninfluenced by insider expertise. The sheer volume of production contained within those walls made clear that the love of printed matter is strong and everlasting, and that publishing as artistic practice is alive and well. Pair that with the cute bunting flags at the school’s entryway, and hands-down, TOABF gets my gold star.
Alana Traficante is a writer, curator and arts administrator based in Hamilton, Ontario.
Catherine Heard, Imaging Phantoms
Curated by Melissa Bennett
Art Gallery of Hamilton -- June 17-September 25, 2016
There’s something both subversive and forgiving in calling upon medical science to realize a work about a schizophrenic woman’s subjugation at a Knoxville, Tennessee hospital in 1948. Catherine Heard’s subject, a patient known today only by her pseudonym Myrllen, created densely embroidered garments over seven years of hospitalization, dense with images drawn from magazines of the day – save for the silhouette of a falling woman with crutch in hand, seemingly an icon of her own imagining.
Catherine Heard’s research on Myrllen is the first academic study of the artifacts remaining of her in the Tennessee State Museum. To interpret this subject for Imaging Phantoms at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, she undertook a prolonged residency at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton to probe anatomical objects for the subconscious insights they have to offer.
Catherine Heard, Myrllen: A Portrait, 2016. Mixed media (including fabric and embroidery) with projected animation. Photo: Mike Lalich
Myrllen: A Portrait springs from a large head, resting decapitated on its side like Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse. Its features are similarly non-descript; most tellingly, while it has eyes and nose and one carefully articulated ear, this head lacks a mouth with which to speak. And yet, the many barium-coated layers of fabric that comprise the sculpture’s mass create countless fissures suggestive of book pages waiting for a curious thumb to leaf its past apart.
Heard built this head through slow handiwork using hundreds of layers of found linens and lace, as well as the CT scans of an anonymous woman. This method anticipates not only the thin cross-sections culled from medical imaging, but also the process through which sculptural forms are built on a 3D printer, which conducts a similar act of reducing shapes to slices that stack themselves up in precise polymer etchings. By insisting upon the materials and physical touch that Myrllen would recognize as her own, Heard reclaims the identity of her subject from the science that would have been her unmaking instead. Lean in deep enough, and the scent of beeswax from within the work fills the nostrils with industriousness.
The monumental projection of a CT scanner’s progress through this crafted ego starts from a dark, crackling silence. The head’s negative trace emerges face-first from between two parallel beams of light, gazing back with hollow eye sockets that are soon subsumed by a madness of lace: birds and flowers flung one layer upon the other, interrupted occasionally by that haunting silhouette of a falling woman and her crutch before it all fades to the diminutive point that is the back of her skull.
The other presence in the gallery has no obvious relationship to Myrllen save that of its making; thankfully, the two works inhabit their own separate spaces in an otherwise darkened room and are therefore given sufficient space to breath out their own ideas. While Myrllen: A Portrait claims considerable agency through a compelling story and the exaggerated scale of object and animation alike, Phantom presents a passive and fragile tableau: a shrunken being made of barium and vegetation pinned like a butterfly to the wall.
He is a homunculus – malformed and flayed, head lolling upon the thickened obstruction of a neck that heightens the flat desiccation of the rest of his body. The hands, however, are delicately perfect with long tapered fingers that curve in offering from their near-crucifixion to the wall. Like Myrllen’s head, this body provides a canvas to be penetrated by a CT scanner, the images from which are animated and projected downward upon a low plinth that reads as surgical table in this unsettling scene – and maybe here, in this clinical chill, do we begin to see something more of this work’s linkage to Myrllen’s plight.
While the slide of radiation through Myrllen’s mind is broken down into flickering frames like a shuffled deck of cards, the animation of Phantom is uncannily smooth. Its first and last manifestations are flickers of ghost-white candle flame that unfold as the beginnings of a brain. The dancing tip of a foot teases further down before the complexity of a belly bursts all the body’s innards out from the centre of this mute slab. Absent lungs appear to expand and contract, veins flex with the flow of blood.
While exquisitely slow to unfold, these animations of body and mind begin and end inside a matter of minutes – illusions of life as fleeting as the real thing.
Stephanie Vegh is a visual artist, arts writer and Executive Director of the Hamilton Arts Council.
In the Studio: Andrea Kastner
Andrea Kastner has lived in six cities across Canada in her thirty-odd years, and lucky for me, Hamilton has been her home for the past two. Before she and her family move on to their next abode in Iowa this summer, I finally visited her studio in a proper way.
We met about a year and a half ago, and she currently lives about fifty paces away from my house. Trouble is, we’ve got kids who like to play together, and the conversation tends to turn towards the quality of the maple syrup as we scarf down pancakes at my place, in snippets of conversation in between the children’s chatter. When I saw her this morning at the bus stop with kids in tow, and chatted with her three-year old, Jonah about the awe-inspiring details of the number four bus, I started to miss her already.
Our visit took place a few weeks ago, just as her studio was bursting with paintings stacked two or even eight deep against the walls. It was the night before the works were sent to Montreal for an exhibition, and the smell of paint was still there, some of the canvases still wet. Considering the small size of her home studio, the works contain a lot of deep spatial considerations. For the past ten years, Andrea has been looking at urban landscapes, focusing on the buildings and infrastructure, and in these recent works, highlighting the rapid changes happening around her in downtown Hamilton. As residents of the north end, we’ve both witnessed the building of the new GO station, and the creep of gentrification. Dumpsters sit in front of at least one house on every block, followed by endless construction crews. The real estate market has caught up to us here and change is palpable. I have loved the neighbourhood so far for its realness and its grit, its good mix of artists and working class folks and culturally diverse families, the quiet, and the close proximity to the harbour. It reminds me so much of the time I lived in and loved the north end of Halifax.
Andrea’s work, whether made while she lived in Montreal, Sackville, Edmonton, Toronto or Kamloops, has always looked at the overlooked spots in a city, placing value on back alleys and especially the garbage in them. But she’s not just another artist looking at garbage - she has worked with refuse as a material from many different angles, and the works tend to imbue found materials with character and poetry. Her Hamilton paintings show construction debris, trucks, train tracks and buildings in limbo. She incorporates collage too, adding a nice nod to the visual perception of these spaces, once or twice removed through photography and reproduction. I think I could go on about Marshall McLuhan’s theories of mediation, or theories about photographic and print reproduction in terms of realism and fantasy, but our conversation didn’t lead us there.
I was first enthralled by the beauty in the painterly quality of her canvases: her deft touch that treats the tiniest of spaces and the largest swaths of colour with equal weight, the negative spaces that sit perfectly next to areas that have been highly worked. We talked about the familiarity of the sites she’s painting, but there were other familiar elements too - a painting of a side of a house that I know, though cropped in view to show only its upper story from the side, bears a trace of its neighbouring building from another era. It can’t seem to shake the shadow of the roof line of the past adjoining structure, after it was evidently torn down and rebuilt as a shorter house. But Andrea’s take on this particular site is not so photographic or collage-based; this one has dark painted angular shadows, and ambiguous areas that are filled with an otherworldly blue. One blue section is the sky; the other takes up the space of the second story window of the house, but given the time of day she’s depicting, it’s an impossible blue.
Andrea Kastner. Dreamers, 2016 oil on canvas, 20" x 26"
The longer I look at it, the more I wonder about the fantastical sources that those blues must have — and then we get to talking about aliens and lights and outer space. I hadn’t thought “science fiction!” when I first encountered her work, but now that I think further about it, I love that she is playing with her own bizarre narratives, though they need not ever be told to the viewer. The black angular shadows on the lower right of the painting seem at first to describe an eavestrough, but as we talk further, we decide that they really look more like this character we can’t quite recall, but both remember from watching TV as kids in the early 1980s. Further research on my part reveals that I’m thinking of a classic silhouetted burglar figure (a dominating fear of my youth) crossed with “Teeny Little Super Guy” from Sesame Street. Remember him? No? “You can’t tell a hero by his size, he’s just a little teeny super guy.” Wikipedia tells me that those stop-motion animated shorts featured him always in his residence, a live-action, regular-sized kitchen. This doesn’t immediately illuminate Andrea’s practice, though I could likely whip up a quasi-convincing piece about the ever-evolving pedestrian world she depicts in contrast to the controlled domestic surroundings of “Super Guy,” but I shall refrain.
Andrea Kastner. Rupture, 2016. Oil on canvas, 60" x 72"
Andrea’s focus will surely evolve with what I imagine will be very different views in Iowa City, where the family is moving because her husband, Colin Lyons, landed a year-long artist and teaching position in the town where American Gothic was born. After that it’s off to Binghamton, New York, where Colin has accepted a permanent teaching gig. With luck, we in Hamilton have earned a place in their hearts, and they’ll return.
Melissa Bennett is a curator and writer, and currently holds the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Hamilton.
I may be the only person (or artist) in Hamilton who thinks the premise behind the Hundreddollargallery (HDG), isn’t the greatest thing since peanut buster parfaits, frites with mayonnaise, or heck, the goddamn Dollar Store – otherwise known as the cheapest place to get crappy art and party supplies.
I do, however, love the intimacy and unpretentiousness of the gallery, the shows that include just the right mix of good and bad art (this is subjective, of course), and its proximity to most of my favourite places in downtown Hamilton. The pithy name of the gallery is most excellent, especially when it’s spelled without spaces between each word or when called by its acronym, HDG, which rolls off the tongue, kind of like PS1.
And, I adore Andrew McPhail and Stephen Altena, the dream-duo of gallerists in Hamilton’s nearly non-existent commercial art scene. They are the kind of gallerists with whom we all want to work – they are organized, attentive, and charming. They love art and artists. They are artists.
Wait. Is HDG just an art project? A kind of postmodern nod to the Salon des Refusés? I’m not sure.
But, in case McPhail and Altena are serious about running a contemporary commercial gallery, why does everything have to cost one hundred dollars? It might just be another rumour, but I’ve heard that McPhail and Altena modeled their operation after the Dollar Store. If that’s true, not everything at the Dollar Store is a dollar. Some stuff costs 50 cents, and other things have a two or three-dollar price tag.
Another bargain business model comes to mind: the WALMART one, which underprices, and undervalues everything and everyone. One can buy (one of a million copies of) a Hand Painted Oil Painting on Canvas - Ready to Hang, online or in person at one of the many waste-land-parking-lot locations for $119.00. Is it with that kind of semi-disposable art market that galleries like Hundreddollargallery, and artists in general, are being forced to compete? Maybe. By setting a value of $100 on everything, is HDG not undervaluing the work of artists in much the same way that Walmart treats its employees? Perhaps not so extreme, but you get the point.
The cheekiness of HDG, the cynicism, or (if you have some knowledge of the art world) the joke has not gone unnoticed. The market-driven, greedy-capitalist art system exists, just not in Hamilton, and really only a tiny bit in Canada. But we read about, how insipid and ugly the art auctions are, how it is a kind of pissing contest between white men, whose primary goal it is to buy that Picasso painting before the guy next to him at the urinal zips-up.
McPhail and Altena might well be railing against that system by using a Dollar Store business plan with an art-should-be-affordable-for-everyone mandate. That business model however, or the democracy of and ideology around consuming useless crap, works really well for places that stink like plastic toys and damp Depends, but not so much for a gallery.
Svava Juliusson is a visual artist based in Hamilton, Ontario.
