Christopher Reid Flock, Iris McDermott & Christina Sealey at the Carnegie Gallery in Dundas

Christopher Reid Flock’s first exhibition since winning the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery’s Winifred Shantz Award for Ceramics late last year amply demonstrates this accomplishment through the visually arresting vessels in Basking at the Carnegie Gallery. From the most dramatically extended forms to clusters of tiny pots whose interiors punctuate the floor with candy-bright caverns, Flock’s chromatic playfulness is equally evident in forms long divorced from their teapot origins: strange amalgams of thick fortification and crumbling delicacy enlivened by glazes that cloak clay like velvet in some cases and spray lightly across the surfaces of others.

Iris McDermott in the Carnegie’s TBA Artspace takes this painterly slippage in the ceramicist’s craft to its literal extremes in Something Else, her debut of recent paintings created as a departure from her long pottery career. Her array of still lifes and domestic interiors owe as much to Modernist influences as they do the potter’s formal intuition for the malleable quality of objects that stand to gain and lose dimension through the whim of the brush.



Christina Sealey, Descending (Dundurn)

While McDermott’s paintings are lively with the joy of early explorations, Christina Sealey’s paintings and drawings in At Night are rich with the freedom that comes from a slow journey towards material mastery. Her long line of technically accomplished paintings have often balanced precise realism with thinly defined open space, a poetic trait that culminates here in drawings that luxuriate in silver-laced puddles of black ink that hang heavy with presence and significance. This shivering darkness and the dramatic angles Sealey has flung upon her subjects feels emblematic of a distinctly Hamiltonian point-of-view: sharply toppled down stairs and over the precipice of the Niagara escarpment, diving into an abyss of possibility.


Carnegie Gallery: http://www.carnegiegallery.org/exhibitions/
Christina Sealey & Christopher Reid Flock continue until March 1.
Iris McDermott continues until March 29.


Stephanie Vegh is a Hamilton-based visual artist and writer whose criticism has appeared in Scotland's Map Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Hamilton Arts & Letters, in addition to her own blog. Her drawings and installations have shown most recently at the upArt Contemporary Art Fair and Nathaniel Hughson Gallery in Hamilton. She is the Executive Director of the Hamilton Arts Council and a member of the Curatorial Committee for Hamilton's annual Supercrawl. She is also Akimblog's Hamilton correspondent and can be followed @Stephanie_Vegh on Twitter.