Show Catalogue Last Days of Ice & Snow

During February of 2020, five artists of various backgrounds participated in the public art event, the Last Days of Ice and Snow, in the Crown Point and Homeside neighbourhoods in Hamilton’s East End. The setting for their commissioned temporary art projects, which included installations, performances, and interventions, was an urban walking path along an original pipeline that distributes clean water to the City of Hamilton. These artistic creations were not part of some urban revitalization plan, however. Instead of favouring some conventional civic agenda, these pieces disrupted rather than embellished their particular location.

These artworks both celebrated and scrutinized the critical condition and distribution of water. For this dual purpose Hamilton artists Donna Akrey, Edgardo Moreno, Klyde Brooks, Dave Gould and Trisha Leigh Lavoie blurred the boundaries among traditional media, fusing craft, video, music, sculpture and language. As public art, these works invited public opinion and reaction.

Following the pioneering ideas of the philosopher John Dewey about bringing art to life experience, these interventions were placed in a community in which art is not usually accessible. The presence of the installations in the recreational space of a trail and a playground made visible the dilemma of art’s enormous potential for changing both artists and audiences. Resistance and conflict have always been factors of these transformations. ^[1]

The problem of the frame is one of the most critical issues in traditional aesthetics. For this reason my curatorial query for this project questions its frame, that is, the limitations of public art projects. Recent theories contend that the border in relation to space should be considered dynamic, anything but static, with the surrounding space. The outline is “the repose” “in the fullness of motion.”^[2] In this regard, the art projects implied a dialectical process of experience, whereby the artist and the active observer encountered each other, their material and mental environments and their culture at large. Thus considering the frame as an open process of interaction with the environment, the question is, to what extent were nondescript objects, quotidian events, the randomness of the streets and the encounters and confrontations with the audience part of the meaning of the Last Days of Ice and Snow project?

Donna Akrey set up Tip of the Iceberg (The Last Icebergs) at the Andrew Warburton Park on Tragina Av. N. She invited the audience to make their own iceberg with a casting apparatus. While a few neighbours took up the challenge, the piece was repeatedly damaged, and the artist had to dismantle it. The community’s response to this work raised some profound questions and illustrates the challenges that interventionist artists can encounter in the public space. Akrey installed another work on the same site to engage the audience differently. This second piece consisted of a foam sculpture with the word SORRY in big letters. This second phase of Akrey’s project acknowledges her piece as dialogical negotiation and exchange with the neighbourhood. The organizing collective solicited community responses to the exhibition by means of posters and flyers and social media in community groups. These tactics were employed to prepare and educate an audience for involvement and dialogue, strategies that could be an entirely separate project beyond the reach of this exhibition.

Trisha Leigh Lavoie installed her Iced Fishing piece as a sort of yarn bombing environment in the neighbourhood near the corner of Park Row N and Dunsmure Road. She reclaimed and personalized this spot on the trail by building a fishing hut in white quilt batting, set up against a backyard fence. She used the materiality of crocheting as a feminist tool to bring objects made in the privacy of her studio into public space. Making crochet art objects to create small narratives, Lavoie’s installation functioned as a portrait of an ice fishing hut. Inside the structure, through peepholes cut into the fabric of the hut, the audience could see these crocheted items on the floor: an ice hole blanket, a radio, a beef jerky bag, two cans of beer, a thermos, a fishing rod, a cooler and on top of it a box of donuts and an actual catch- – a green-white fish! Lavoie shared profound and illuminating comments about her participation in the exhibition in her on-site artist talk and in her public posts on social media. She was aware of the hazard of leaving her work unattended in a neighbourhood that was not her own. Lavoie’s original intention was to display her pieces for the duration of the festival, not to have them taken away by the audience. In effect, her beautiful crocheted works were accidental gifts to this community.

Edgardo Moreno’s time-based installation, Melt, was first set up at the junction of Britannia Avenue and Cannon, and later on Fairfield Avenue. The work consisted of a sound piece of his own composition and of found internet videos of melting glaciers and rising waters, which he sampled, spliced, and diced in light and sound vibrations. These elements were intertwined with unnoticed events in the footpath’s everyday life and the performative aspect of an engaging audience. The sound of Moreno’s piece was available online, but to appreciate it in his entirety, one had to go to that stretch of the path where he projected the striking images on the white siding façade of a one-story house (and later a second story window), that perfectly fit the proportions of his protection. On the first site, he showed the entire projection apparatus: the projector, the sound system, cables that connected these devices and headphones. All these elements were part of the aesthetic experience, along with the cars and pedestrians passing by and the regular noises of a winter night in the neighbourhood. Despite the reproducibility of these images, which we can access from the comfort of our homes, the materiality of Melt offered the opportunity to have an experience of proximity and presence, allowing the audience to move freely within the installation, making them conscious of their actions on the scene.

Dave Gould’s Sno-Thro was a joyful piece set up in the basketball court of the Andrew Warburton Park. Play as a methodology was at the core of this interactive work. Sno-Thro invited the public to throw snowballs at sound targets framed by a wooden board structure. The box offered six sounds from a variety of objects: a set of three stainless steel bottles, a big metal platter, two cymbal drums, a tambourine, and a cowbell. Play is an unsettling element that brings possibilities to everyday life and could be employed as a manner of resistance. In his studies of play, Juan Huizinga wrote that play, of which art is an integral part, is one of the main bases of civilization. Art is the realm where we are allowed to play — we need to play, adapt and evolve, the historian argued. In his artist statement, Gould says he is “addicted to improvising and live moments of discovery” — such as when we are playing. Visitors lined up at the Sno-Thro site, taking turns to throw a snowball provided by the artist and make a joyful sound, or not, depending on their aim. Incidentally, this was another piece that was partially damaged.

Klyde Broox’s The Revolution has changed! consisted of four paragraphs from one of his dub poems. In this rather discreet piece, the white text was laid out on four wooden panels and installed on the Geraldine Copps Parkette parking lot fence at Kenilworth Av N, facing the trail. The piece engaged the audience through reading, prompting visitors to ponder Broox’s ideas about how the revolution has changed, as the title implies. The audience was the actor who custom-tailored the elements of the text by contrasting them with their own experience and reading tempo, spontaneously reverberating and actualizing the poet’s words. Like the dub poet, the reader employs improvisation tactics that foster discoveries in meaning and rhythm. The fortuitous reader and the poet create a space where writing is dispersed and unfolds in time by the reading. Broox’s wordplays make a denouncement that reclaims the climate of the place, perhaps resonating with how we support change now, that “…involves machine” by digitally supporting a cause or a political campaign.

This essay was written in the shadow of the Covid-19 outbreak and police encounters that prompted protests in many cities in the U.S. and Canada. During this time, art world leaders were talking about the importance of public art during and after the pandemic. They discussed how galleries and museums could reach a wider audience beyond their walls while providing income and employment for artists. Months later, Confederation monuments were toppled and Black Lives Matter was painted in yellow capitals on the pavement in several cities. Such an initiative was even commissioned by the mayor of Washington DC. The Last Days of Ice and Snow projects expose and respond to the encroachment of corporate and governmental interests in public space. In so doing, these artworks remained a point of dialogue, confrontation and transformation.

^[1] Clement, Alexis. “Reconsidering John Dewey’s Art as Experience.” Hyperallergic. Mar 25, 2013.

^[2] Rebentisch, Juliane, et al. Aesthetics of Installation Art. Sternberg Press, 2012.

Rita Camacho Lomeli is a curator, educator and artist based in Toronto.