Today I made pretty decent time on the express bus to Hamilton and had a bit of time to kill before the AGH opened. I found wandering downtown Hamilton was even more depressing on a Sunday, since an awful lot of shops were closed.
There is this large mall (Hamilton Place?) with an indoor farmer's market that I often visit. Parts of it were completely closed off or permanently closed down and looked like a ghost town (the way so much of Buffalo does) but I did find an open food court with a decent fast food curry place (this is one area where Vancouver was better than Toronto, at least to date). I was running a bit late by this point, so I skipped the trek over to the farmer's market.
The show at the AGH was ok, but not mind-blowing. It was an exhibit on cartoonists from Canada, with a focus on independent cartoonists. The most famous (to me) was Seth. The catalogue is fairly reasonable at $25, but I didn't want to just pick it up (and I didn't have time to properly browse it). At the moment, it still isn't in any of the local libraries, and apparently it won't be offered up on Amazon until mid April(!), so the best way to get one is to trek over to Hamilton. (Though I will see if the AGO happens to have any on my next trip there.) They had a smaller exhibit on some pieces they have added to the collection recently. Probably the highlight was a Colville piece donated in 2014.
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| Alex Colville, Traveller, 1992 |
From my perspective, the pieces upstairs in the permanent collection were generally the best. They had a reasonable mix of the Group of Seven (and Emily Carr) as well as the Painters Eleven.
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| Tom Thomson, The Birch Grove, Autumn, 1915-6 |
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| Tom Hodgson, Vertical Construction, 1957 |
It was 1 by the time I wrapped up, and I was starting to get a bit antsy about getting over to McMaster. I think this probably is my first time going over to McMaster, though I've been to the Queens campus (in Kingston) a couple of times. I needed to get there by 2 for a Kronos Quartet concert.
It looks like the 47 GO Bus goes out there, as well as several variants of the 5 bus (run by HSR). I managed to get on a 5C, and after asking the driver if he was going to McMaster, settled in for the ride. I kept checking my phone to make sure we were broadly in the right direction. Now after I got to campus, I got a bit lost, but I finally found the place with about half an hour to spare.
There's no point in sugar coating it. I didn't really care for the piece (Terry Riley's Sun Rings), as it was just too long (80 minutes) and frankly inane in many places. I still admire the Kronos Quartet for their dedication to new music and really committing themselves to the piece, but this was a dud of a concert for me. They didn't even do any of their often raucous encores.
I also find McMaster a pretty ugly campus and probably won't be back anytime soon. (I was hoping to check out the McMaster Museum of Art, but it is never open on Sundays and not until noon on Saturdays, which really makes it a drag to get to, and basically something I will ignore in terms of regional cultural attractions.)
I was a bit stressed trying to figure out the bus route back, but I finally managed it, so if I have to go back to McMaster, the next time around will be simpler. I did struggle a bit trying to figure out where the GO bus would pick me up (having not done this in well over a year), so I walked over to the GO bus terminal, where at least I would be assured of getting on the bus. I was a little surprised that the next 16 leaving was a double-decker bus, but that was fine, and I had some extra space to myself on the upper deck.
So it was a moderately successful trip to Hamilton, though not one I will likely be repeating anytime soon.
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