Out of the Cold

By: Alexandra Florescu

Your thin fall jacket is no match for the whipping wind, the crowd is a tide of people standing shoulder-to-shoulder and your head has started to ache from the pounding music.

For those who attended Hamilton’s annual festival called Supercrawl, the previous description might have applied to you. At the very least, it applied to me. I had gone on a mission over to James Street North with a couple of friends on Sept. 12 to enjoy the live music, art and food vendors. However, after a few hours of admiring the attractions, we decided to pick an indoor art exhibit at random and explore it away from the cold and bustle of the street.

We happened upon an exhibit named Art Forms Youth Art Studio. After walking through a brick-walled corridor, we came upon a cavernous room whose white walls were covered with art. Initially, there was nothing that quite caught my eye. The wall to the left had an array of hanging photographs, in the back there was a video projection and in the center of the room there was a geometric art installation. Walking around the dimly lit room, I happened to stop in front of an informational poster on the exhibit.

As it turns out, we had unknowingly walked into an exhibit put on by Art Forms, a youth arts organization that provides free weekly visual arts sessions, acting classes and dance programs to 16 to 25-year- olds of the Hamilton community, specifically targeting at-risk youth. What I had previously believed to be just another Supercrawl art exhibit turned out to be unlike all the rest in one key factor – this exhibit was created with the artists, not the audience, in mind. With a renewed understanding, I turned back to the pieces I had already seen in order to truly acknowledge them for what they were.

To the left was a wall adorned with photographs of the youth that had participated in the program and poems or stories they had written. While the poems painted a dark image of what life for these troubled teens looked like, the photographs were what struck me. Some featured people laughing, others had people singing, and in some they were playing musical instruments. Moreover, their smiles bore no traces of a difficult life, their demeanor light and jubilant. Through something as simple as a photograph, it was clear to see that Art Forms had given them the chance at life without addiction, or homelessness, or illness.

To the right of the wall, in the center of the room, there was an art installation made of a wood frame draped in a tapestry of bright, mismatched cloth. The shape and size of a small tent, it was impossible to miss. The wooden frame supported what seemed to be a shelter; its duality was apparent in its role as both an art piece and a comment on homelessness. Despite all this, the installation seemed hopeful. Strings of lights within the tent caused it to glow from the inside, the warm-yellow light filtering through the cloth as if it were a giant lantern. At points throughout the structure, the cloth was not secured to the wooden posts. Rather, it was left to trail out as if it were billowing in the wind. In other parts, cloth was interjected with pieces of paper scribed in black writing.

As I studied the vibrant reds and purples of the cloth, I noticed a crowd growing towards the back corner of the exhibit. The object of their fixation was, what I discovered to be, not quite an art piece. On the wall there was a long piece of white paper with only the outline of a large, sideways triangle and the title “Tell Me a Story… (True or False)” displayed across the top.

Underneath the poster was a box of coloured crayons that people could use contribute whatever they wished to the piece. Some lines people chose to write were inspirational, others comedic, and others confessional. What was clear, however, was that every person that walked by took the time to read the wall before making his or her own contribution. Starting at first with a few lines like “A life without reflections is not worth living” to “It all happened because I went in the labyrinth,” the mural soon became cluttered with each person’s distinct scrawl. Incredibly imaginative and well executed, the wall got a plethora of praises for its ingenuity and interactive nature. Yet this mural was not the only piece to which the public could contribute.

A table bearing the sign “Create Your Own Hamilton” had been located outside the venue all night, but as the night drew to a close, it was brought inside. The piece consisted of a metal wire frame draped in long rectangular pieces of fabric. As they had walked by, people had been beckoned to write one thing that would improve the city of Hamilton on his or her own piece of fabric. Upon completion, their piece of fabric would be added to the collage already building on top of the metal frame. The finished product resembled a pile of trash, but the vibrant colours of the fabric draped over the structure symbolized the hope for a better Hamilton and the hope for at risk youth to rise out of the rubble into a better future.

Unfortunately, having been so wrapped up in the exhibit, I noticed too late that the crowd had left and the doors were being locked. My visit cut shorter than I wished, I left Art Forms with an inexplicable feeling of having discovered a gem underneath the rubble and I vowed to return.