Jane ADENEY Sara ANGELUCCI Tom BENDTSEN Suzanne CARTE-BLANCHENOT Lesley Loksi CHAN Susan DETWILER Simon FRANK Insoon HA Dave HIND The HUNTERS Ivan JURAKIC Fiona KINSELLA Gareth LICHTY Tor LUKASIK-FOSS Steve MAZZA Aaron MURPHY Liss PLATT Gayle YOUNG and Reinhard REITZENSTEIN C. WELLS These are a few of the colourful local nicknames for the TH&B markers that can still be found hidden in plain sight on the side of rail bridges and train stations around Hamilton. TH&B was the common name of the former Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo railway that operated out of Hamilton, crisscrossing the Niagara Peninsula from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, from 1895-1987. The rail line was a vital link that like so many things in the city TO HELL & BACK, was folded into a larger corporation – in this case CN Rail – and forgotten. TITS, HOOTERS & BOOBS, Resuscitating the moniker of this defunct IRED, ungry ROKE, railway, TH&B is the creative partnership T H & B of Simon Frank, Dave Hind, Ivan Jurakic, and Tor Lukasik-Foss; a group of visual TRAMPS, HOBOS & BUMS... artists operating out of the Hamilton area. The group collaborates on projects that respond to site, context and history, and sets out to examine the often unexpected intersections between culture, industry and the natural environment. TH&B encapsulates an alliance between artists with ties to the region. As such, the team envisioned developing a large invitational warehouse exhibition that would focus on sculpture, installation and performance. To this end, we pursued a partnership with 270 Sherman, to secure a large venue in the industrial heart of Hamilton – the old sewing floor of the on Saturday, May 3, and attended by over Imperial Cotton Centre, 30,000 square feet 300 people. Timed to coincide with Doors located on the 3rd floor of 270 Sherman Open Hamilton on May 3-4, we again Avenue North. As a mixed use industrial welcomed several hundred visitors to heritage site, 270 Sherman is a prime both the 270 Sherman complex and the example of the potential for creative exhibition. adaptive reuse; a former textile mill transformed into an artist-friendly complex The exhibition aimed a spotlight on housing artists, designers, photographers, the vitality of the visual arts scene in and light industrial manufacturing side-by- Hamilton, and tapped into the largely side. The building represents an important underappreciated ability of contemporary piece of architectural and manufacturing artists to inhabit, transform and activate history and was itself once connected to a derelict spaces. TH&B staked out this spur line of the TH&B. post-industrial territory and struck a large pulsing vein. A select group of emerging and established artists were invited to take part in this On behalf of the TH&B collective; inaugural exhibition. Each was invited to respond to the site – and more broadly Ivan Jurakic, to its texture – to develop new work Tor Lukasik-Foss, or recontextualize existing works that Simon Frank, reflected the post-industrial essence of the Dave Hind location. Importantly, the participants had demonstrated ties to the site and the city – through studios, family history, education and employment. Word of mouth spread about the opening held on Saturday April 12, 2008, and the venue was thronged by over 600 visitors. A closing event featuring several performances was also presented in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Hamilton TO HELL & BACK ANXIETY (living on the wrong side of the tracks) The reduction of train tracks to a line drawing on a blank slate is historically fitting, given this time of such uncertainty. The art historian and critic Deanna Petherbridge speaks of these recurring moments in history, the cyclical return to drawing as a medium “of doubt and crisis, as a medium of rediscovery and aising the dead is reaffirmation.” 1 As the simplest art, the Rsomething of an occupational hazard in one most accessible to hands that have this business of making art. little else to hold, drawing is the familiar line – the comforting clarity of the road’s By 1987, the TH&B Railway Company was bisecting line marker on the journey home no longer a functioning railway; the textile – and a medium quick to rebel in the mill at 270 Sherman had adapted itself adolescent scrawl of naughty mnemonics to diminished demand some twenty years on the TH&B railway bridges. earlier. In the daunting face of this post- industrial erosion, TH&B is more than the The line is also authority, embedded in sum of all our zombies: the hollow factory nature and memory like a monolith – the space and the resurrected name that cedar remembers verticality before it is became an exhibition in the Spring of 2008. felled and reduced to a wooden beam. The Despite the three cities that went into most insidious lines inscribed on land are its abbreviation back in 1895, the TH&B those that set out boundaries and draw Railway never did extend so far as either them out indefinitely, condemning the Buffalo or Toronto. Its dusty railway tracks, other (and often, ourselves) to living on the fallen into disuse, etch out the paths too wrong side of the tracks with only bitter long untraveled. marginality and cases of beer for company. Unlike the stretch of the old TH&B, this line In its present condition, the TH&B rail has no terminus or transfer station, cannot line is a drawing of loss, a momento-mori be cut off at the point where a taxidermied rendered in ties of wood and steel. sparrow alights on a wire. There has been too much capital invested in this millwork of a more idiosyncratic sort. The industrious narrative of progress, counted legacy of the textile mill at 270 Sherman out in threads of human hair. is in the merging of many threads, be that the making of cotton duck or more As both psychoanalyst and philosopher, radical propositions: a subversive weaving Julia Kristeva has written extensively about of garden hoses into roiling lawns of anxiety as a pathological problem, but also green plastic. This new suburban textile as an integral instrument of selfhood. As has a weight that was elusive in its raw debilitating as anxiety can be, acceptance component lines; heavily worked, it has of its commonplace nature allows for an grown in scale and become a monster of assertive appropriation of fear and doubt substance. as productive, even creative elements. Conversely, the eradication of these worries DISAPPEARANCE (woven clouds that vanish into smog) in a too-easy life can lead to a dangerous complacency, the cure that brings on a The iconic image of a train charging over robotic, easily manipulated emptiness: open land leaves two discernible traces in its wake – the perspective line of its Midway between these two solutions, tracks, and the trailing veil of smoke and lie intellectual works and art. These steam. Both the rails and the cloud are are the actual sites of this anxiety and notations in the same travelogue, but revolt. The artist’s goal is to find the where the former draws a map, the latter representation of this state of anxiety. dissolves into a shape whose element is It’s not a question of claiming that this so elusive that it is inevitably consigned to does not exist or to accept living in shapelessness as air. marginality, but to represent this revolt in order to survive. 2 Hamilton is a landscape hazy with smog, visceral things woven from factory Left to their own devices, abandoned smokestacks rising in the north, one factories become monuments to stillborn ponderous puff upon another. Heavy anxiety, their dusty tiles left to swell in though they are with the ominous whiff pregnant parodies of decay. The post- of pollution, these clouds float and fill the industrial task, therefore, is to return these sky with a taffeta architecture, lighter laborious sites to their purpose, towards than steel and not nearly as loud as all our bombastic bellows and train whistle blues. to drop into her bowl of bones? Rhythm and song have swallowed down HOMECOMING (going to the dogs) and spat out much of Hamilton’s character in the past, but the air is growing What is left of a Hamilton has been increasingly asthmatic: breathless as reduced to this seeming nothing, this factory after factory closes its doors. I am hacking cough of poverty? The downward writing these words under the present-day spiral does not denote the lack of a further threat facing the Hamilton division of U.S. journey, but rather signals an Orphic return Steel, formerly the ubiquitous Stelco, an from the underworld. After the exhalation unthinkable closure that has shocked this of the last smoggy breath, there will always familiar geography of labour and land, and be another inhalation, a necessary search tilted the Great Lakes themselves on their for scent (and Hamilton isn’t derisively earthly axis. called Stinktown for nothing): And there is another feeling that is a Whenever her father was alone with a great consolation in poverty. I believe dog in a house he would lean over and everyone who has been hard up has smell the skin at the base of its paw. experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, This, he would say, as if coming away almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself from a brandy snifter, is the greatest at last genuinely down and out. You have smell in the world! A bouquet! Great talked so often of going to the dogs – rumours of travel! She would pretend and well, here are the dogs, and you have disgust, but the dog’s paw was a wonder: reached them, and you can stand it.