A Vareyed view of growing up in Hamilton

September 24, 2008

Jeff Mahoney
The Hamilton Spectator
(Sep 24, 2008)

September is like the sound of your parent's voice calling you back indoors at the end of an afternoon.

You're torn. It's still light out, and it's only the first call. But you turn to look. There are powerful draws. The smell of cooking. The hunger in your belly.

Part of the great pull inward that starts around this time of year is the getting up of all the fall art shows in the galleries after a summer fasting. Powerful draws.

Let's start at the Transit Gallery, 230 Locke St. S. , with Matthew Varey's Growing Up in Hamilton (to Sept. 28).

Without the titles, you might mistake Varey's traumatized oils for pure abstract. But only for an instant; there are giveaway landscape references -- horizon lines, weather motifs, topography.

So, despite the predominantly abstract idiom, you know just where you are in these paintings.

Not just in Hamilton , but in the Hamilton in someone's head. Varey's trip here is a jerky, chaotic ambulance ride across a feverishly remembered city.

The lingering images we rescue, from the angry collisions of shape and colour that we see as he speeds us along, are ones of injury, to the city and its psyche, and they're thrashing in the stretcher, begging to be finished off.

Varey's aerial take, on such local landmarks as the escarpment and the harbour, are almost operatic in their luridness and busy, breakneck formal action.

The greens, in what one takes to be valleys in the painting Escarpment Route , are like arsenic. The red wishbone (of what one takes to be two roads converging) is the colour of blood. Dull slashes of cloud inscribe Xs onto a migraine sky, like the eyes of a dead person in a cartoon.

Yet -- how to explain? -- the show, overall, is almost sentimental.

Growing Up In Hamilton (is that a pun?) is not subtle, but it is wildly exciting, sensual in a deliberately cloying manner, with hyperbolic impasto, incongruous colour pairings, and spurs of jagged, intersecting line and shape.

Varey's style of abstract expressionism here isn't new. In fact, some effects are cliche. But mostly he does the style with such exuberance and painterly marksmanship (disguised as carelessness) and it is so eminently suited to his subject that the old well is refreshed.

This is how art communicates -- pulling us indoors from the outside to interpret scenes of the outdoors as the insides of our heads.

Lesia Mokrycke's show at 237 James St. N. graphs the progress, so far, of a young woman's growth into her full powers as an artist.

She is nearing the end of a rigorous apprenticeship. Mokrycke has but one year left in her studies at the Pennsylvania Academy For The Fine Arts, a tough, highly regarded program. The developments in her art illustrate some important paradoxes: What looks easiest is often hardest; The point of studying, in the work of others, everything that has been done before is to discover, in yourself, one thing that hasn't been done yet.

Mokrycke, 23, has abundant gifts -- she was accepted to the program on a scholarship after a time at the Ontario College of Art. And these are evident in her still life paintings, nudes and drawings. You can see the skills improve. When she moves into more unmarked territory -- abstract and conceptual sculpture -- one sees a journey strongly launched, but not yet completed, provisional, as we should expect in one so young.

The piece I like best, which seems most her, is the striking mural that Mokrycke (daughter of Hamilton architect John Mokrycke) was commissioned to paint on the facade of architect Greg Sather's office at the corner of Cannon and Catherine.

The trees of her forest scene play off the tall columns, and there's an optical effect of the actual architecture being pulled off its geometric centre, rendered more organic.

Her show, a dry-run before she becomes a professional, runs to November (best time to view: during art crawl Fridays, second and third of each month).

Congratulations to Astrid and Darcy Hepner for bringing the celebrated Jimmy and Dena Katz to Hamilton from NYC, to photograph about 20 of Hamilton's top music legends.

The photographs that result will be previewed at a Hamilton Place concert Nov. 7 and shown at the Art Gallery of Hamilton starting Nov. 15.

More on this terrific project in this space in coming weeks.

Also in this space in coming weeks, look for reports on shows by Margaret Lindsay Houton, with Ewout de Gelder, at the Village Gallery in Waterdown and by Terry Asma and Katrina Simmons at the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre.

CLARIFICATION: In my last art column, three weeks ago, I referred to James and Margaret Strecker as animal rights activists. I should have used the phrase animal welfare activists.

jmahoney@thespec.com

905-525-3306