Spinning along on my white roadster, I slowed my pace and approached the main gate of Trinity Bellwoods Park on West Queen West, and was greeted by a flock of artsy-types with bikes. There were shaved heads, big glasses, and a woman doing an impromptu performance-piece consisting of falling to the grassy ground.
I assumed that I was in the right place for Art Spin, a free monthly art crawl, in which participants ride in a team of bicycles to get to each gallery, guided each month by a guest curator or artist.
Participants met at Trinity Bellwoods at 6:30 p.m. This month’s leaders were Michael Paré, the president and founder of Queer West, a week-long series celebrating queer arts, and Rui Pimenta who is the founder, coordinator, curator, and leader of the crawl. The two explained that participants of the art crawl are led to a variety of galleries in the city, where they are greeted by the curators and forced to interact with a group of art-enthusiast strangers.
At just past 7 p.m., approximately 20 wanna-be art connoisseurs pedaled into the sunset. The group was made up of an eclectic mix of individuals: largely students, couples, professionals, and amateurs. Following the leader, we did a lap of the park before hitting our first gallery, Lausberg Contemporary. One of two global locations, Lausberg is unique in Toronto, featuring local artists alongside international artists. Their idea is to foster our own scene while keeping in touch with the global. Greeted by Pimenta’s explanation of the space’s mandate — and some well-appreciated refreshments (no free booze, sadly) — we were encouraged to explore the summer exhibition, a collection of sleek, non-representational pieces by various artists. Although fairly subdued and undemanding (read: boring), it was like wading into a kiddy pool of the toured galleries.
Our second stop was InterAccess, a space focusing on new media works. As Pimenta, the fearless leader of the gaggle of cycling art enthusiasts, explained, this space is an important creative hub for digital art, featuring a gallery on the second floor and workshop on the first. Their latest exhibition, Kunstkammer/Wunderkammer, seeks to mimic a cabinet of curiosities, a European practice in which oddities and artifacts are collected and displayed. In this exhibit, however, antique oddities have been replaced with eclectic new media pieces – a banana plant which emits noise when petted, jellyfish-like constructions which gyrate when exposed to sound, a small canvas painting with moving gears – which are displayed in the dim lighting of the second floor. Several of the pieces demand engagement, assigning the viewer an active role. Sometimes you are required to do more than stare at art, tilt your head, step back and sigh. This exhibit was my favorite of the evening: visual enough to catch my attention, sinister enough to make me ask, weird enough to keep me — like a shadowy playground.
Show and Tell Gallery is a quiet but modest space, currently showing two artists — Anthony Lister and Niall McClelland — in a whimsical double-feature exploring such ideas as punishment and reward systems and perpetuated adolescence, with a tongue-in-cheek sass all-too-often absent from recent contemporary art.
PM Gallery boasts the latest works of Keith W. Bentley’s. The gallery owner and curator, a fan of Bentley’s work, explained his somewhat macabre process — due to his unique fascination with Victorian ‘hair art’, Bentley is known for working extensively with hair as a creative material. This latest collection is a series of pieces constructed from found art and horse hair. The pieces aim to immortalize bodies which have since passed, embracing the morbid and calling attention to the unnatural. I found the pieces affected me exactly in the ways the owner had warned: I was simultaneously attracted and repulsed. The black hair against the white walls was visually striking. The idea that these once living creatures had been replaced and used like our earlier ‘readymades’ is conceptually haunting. Looking at one piece, I turned to a viewer on my right and remarked it gave me the creeps -“you know, kind of like when you pull that gross clump of hair from the shower drain?”. But then I realized he was bald, and couldn’t relate.
The evening ended at a quiet bar, locking up our velocipedes and heading for the patio. The group who sat before me, from all walks of life, were incredibly down to earth, affable, keen to listen and eager to tell stories. Nothing breaks the ice between people like hair art.
Art Spin is a monthly art crawl on bicycles. It happens on the last Thursday of the month, and will run until September. Art Spin is a free event, and open to anyone regardless of cycling ability.
Updated (April 26, 2015): Author’s name omitted.
