Enraged, Inertia Ran Off Exhibition

10 women artists intervene with abandoned signposts at the corner of James Street North and Wilson Street in Hamilton.

Exhibition runs from September 2016 to September 2017
(click on names for more information about artists and for curatorial statement)
Sandra Brewster, Erika DeFreitas, Insoon Ha, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, Amelia Jiménez, Ingrid Mayrhofer, Hitoko Okada, Vessna Perunovich, Wing Yee Tong, Elaine Whittaker. Curated by Rita Camacho Lomeli.

The corner of Wilson Street and James Street North – the “Entrance to the Arts District” – is a site that highlights some of the tensions between downtown Hamilton’s past, present and future. Five double-banner stands were erected in the 1980s, abandoned in the ’90s and re-claimed by the arts in 2015 to celebrate Hamilton as the host of the Juno Awards. ENRAGED, INERTIA RAN OFF is a contemporary art intervention by the Red Tree Artists’ Collective, signaling transformation of not only the site, but also of traditional skills employed by women in a post-industrial society, stitching together the divide between traditional craft and fine art. Automatized machinery now performs activities that women used to do in the privacy of the domestic sphere – stitching, embroidering, sewing, knitting – but here they are displayed in a public space.

This project is dedicated to the memory of Amelia Jiménez (1949-2016), who contributed much to arts education and community arts in Hamilton and the surrounding area. Her work from 1994 is a symbolic representation of movement and transience, of time moving forward with no going back. Only through the existence of the body can a work of art be made in order to transcend the artist herself. Just as with the ancient learning of a craft transmitted from one generation to the next, we are left with memories of the time spent with Amelia and what we learned from her.