Art
The fine art of industrial rock – GuelphToday
Painter and musician Adrian Sinclair Hogg has an industrious idea for paying it forward while sharing his art with a pandemic-fatigued public.
“I have been getting these CERB cheques and I wanted a good way to spend it as opposed to buying booze,” said Hogg. “I have been looking for a place to host a show. You know, rent out a space and entertain people a little bit in a weird way.”
Hogg, who performs music under the name Sam and the Ant Nest, and paints under the moniker, Diving Out of Touch, is staging a pop-up exhibition of his paintings inside the shuttered space of the former Starberry Café in the Shops at Paisley plaza.
“I think the old Starberry place is great because it allows people to easily socially distance,” he said. “I am going to try to lay it out so, if people don’t want to go inside, they can just look through the windows because it is essentially a giant showroom.”
He hopes the exhibit, scheduled for the last two weekends of August, will be a welcome distraction for art fans venturing from their homes after months of isolation.
“It gives people something to do during all of this,” he said. “There are no concerts. There is no theatre happening. It might just kill some time.”
The pandemic has created a lot of uncertainty for new and established artists and many, like Hogg, are exploring fresh ideas for promoting their work.
“I made a living being a barista for a while,” said Hogg. “That’s what I did when I was living in Toronto. I have just been working on my art practice for the last five years. I am trying to make the switch into doing that fulltime.”
Hogg was born in Guelph in 1992, the oldest child of multi-media musician and artist Kevin Hogg and Pauline Sinclair director of graduate studies at the University of Guelph. He has a younger sister Camille.
“Thankfully, both of my parents are artists,” he said. “When my mom was my age, she was doing acrylic painting much like myself. My father did some paintings, but I think his artistic career was mostly in music and movies or film.”
The large oil-on-canvas paintings in Hogg’s Diving Out of Touch collection are the survivors of a process of experimentation and introspection that left many canvases on the trash heap.
“There was lots of trial and error,” said Hogg. “I have scrapped a lot of paintings.”
Each scrapped painting was a lesson he didn’t have to learn in a classroom.
“I’m a self-taught artist,” he said. “I briefly went to college, but I dropped out. I was studying film, but it was aiming toward me becoming a camera operator and not doing anything artistic.”
Skipping school was a creative and economic choice.
“If you compare the cost of going to school with scrapping paintings, it is actually cheaper,” he said. “It is cheaper to just try and throw it out and move on to the next one than it is to pay for tuition. So, I did that.”
Accreditation aside, he is clearly a student of the arts with elements from a variety of styles such as cubism, surrealism, abstract and even classical seeping into his work but Hogg doesn’t claim to draw on any of the past masters for inspiration.
“Obviously, I do love visual art, but I can’t think of a visual artist whose style has directly influenced mine,” he said. “I draw most of my influence from industrial rock and bands like Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. I love that genre.”
Hogg performs and records industrial rock under the name Sam and the Ant Nest.
“It is just me,” he said. “It is sampled machine noises with some guitar and some beats under it. It’s on Spotify, iTunes, pretty much all the streaming platforms.”
He hopes to elevate industrial rock beyond its present status as a sub-genre of pop music.
“I want to create a fine art look that also achieves the vibe that goes along with that music,” said Hogg. “But not have it be fan art. I want it to be fine art so, it’s tricky but I am getting there.”
Staging pop-up exhibits is a business model he is exploring as a means to that end.
“This show is sort of a trial for me,” he said. “If it works and I sell a few pieces then it is a viable business strategy to host a pop up. I can basically pick a city, fly there, paint, rent out a pop-up shop, sell the paintings and move on to another city. So, essentially, I get to tour.”
It’s an ambitious goal and Hogg is prepared for the process of trial and error that comes with forging his own path.
“You got to go with the flow,” he said. “If you’ve got an idea you’ve got to paint or make it or whatever it is you do. That’s the thing I am trying to head towards right now.”
The pop-up gallery at 10 Paisley St in Guelph will be open to the public from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., Thursday, Aug. 20 to Sunday Aug. 23 and Thursday, Aug 27 to Saturday, Aug 29.
For a preview of Hogg’s art visit https://www.divingoutoftouch.com
A trio plays a cover of The Eagles hit Take it Easy as a dozen people settle in for an intimate open mic night inside Derrick McCandless and Dawn Mills’s cozy spot off highways 6 and 68 in Manitoba’s Interlake.
Strings of antique-style light bulbs cast a soft glow over the mandolin, banjo and dobro guitar that hang on a wall behind the band. An array of pottery shaped in-house by Mills dots the shelves behind the audience.
The Eriksdale Music & Custom Frame Shop is full of tchotchkes — like an Elvis Presley Boulevard street sign and vintage Orange Crush ad — that create the rustic country-living vibe the couple dreamt up before buying and transforming the vacant space over the past three years.
“I have met so many people in this community through them that I probably wouldn’t have … because of this hub,” says Mills’s cousin Dana-Jo Burdett.
Mills and McCandless are bringing people together in their rural community in more ways than one — though a return to Mills’s hometown wasn’t always in the cards.
The couple met in Winnipeg in 2011 while McCandless was playing a party at Mills’s cousin’s place. They had plans to settle in the Okanagan in McCandless’s home province of B.C. until he suffered a health scare. After that, they decided to head back to the Prairies.
WATCH | McCandless and Mills channel creative spirit into Eriksdale community:
Dawn Mills and Derrick McCandless host the RogerKimLee Music Festival in the Manitoba Interlake community of Eriksdale. They also turned a long-vacant space in town into a live music venue, instrument repair and sales store, and pottery and framing services shop.
It was the height of the pandemic in fall 2020 when the pair relocated to Eriksdale, about 130 km northwest of Winnipeg. They bought the old Big Al’s shop, once a local sharpening business that was sitting vacant.
“He was an icon in the community. He was a school teacher. He did a drama program here,” said Mills. “He brought a lot to the town.”
The building has become their own personal playground and live-in studio.
“It keeps evolving and we keep changing it and every room has to serve multi-function,” says Mills. “It’s a meeting place.”
While they love the quiet life of their community, they’re also a busy couple.
McCandless is a multi-instrumentalist with a former career in the Armed Forces that took him all over. Now, he’s a shop teacher in Ashern who sells and fixes instruments out of the music shop.
WATCH | McCandless plays an original song:
Derrick McCandless plays one of his original songs on acoustic guitar at the Eriksdale Music & Custom Frame Shop in March 2024.
Mills helped found Stoneware Gallery in 1978 — the longest running pottery collective in Canada. She offers professional framing services and sells pottery creations that she throws in-studio.
They put on open mic nights and host a summer concert series on a stage next door they built together themselves. They’re trying to start up a musicians memorial park in Eriksdale too.
One of their bigger labours of love is in honour of McCandless’s good friends Roger Leonard Young, David Kim Russell and Tony “Leon” — or Lee — Oreniuk. All died within months of each other in 2020-2021.
“That was a heart-wrenching year,” McCandless says.
They channeled their grief into something good for the community and started the RogerKimLee Music Festival.
Friends from Winnipeg and the Interlake helped them put on a weekend of “lovely music, lovely food, lovely companionship” as a sort of heart-felt send off, said Mills.
That weekend it poured rain. Festival-goers ended up in soggy dog piles on the floor of the music shop to dry out while Mills and McCandless cooked them sausages and eggs to warm up.
“It was just a great weekend,” says McCandless. “At the end of that, that Sunday, we just said that’s it, we got to do this.”
Mills says the homey community spirit on display during that inaugural year is what the couple has been trying to “encourage in people getting together” ever since.
The festival has grown to include a makers’ market, car show, kids activities, workshops, camping, beer gardens, good food and live music.
This summer, Manitoba acts The Solutions, Sweet Alibi and The JD Edwards Band are on the lineup Aug. 16-18.
Burdett has been a part of the growth, helping with branding, social media and marketing. McCandless and Mills’s habit of bringing people together has also rubbed off on Burdett.
“There’s more of my people out here than I thought, and I am very grateful for that,” says Burdett.
Their efforts to breathe new artistic life into Eriksdale caught the attention of their local MLA.
“The response from family and friend and community has been outstanding,” Derek Johnston (Interlake-Gimli) said during question period at the Manitoba Legislature in March.
“The RogerKimLee Music Festival believes music to be a powerful force for positive social change.”
Dolly Lindell, who has lived in Eriksdale for about three decades, said the couple is adding something valuable that wasn’t quite there before.
“There’s a lot of people that we didn’t even know had musical talent and aspirations and this has definitely helped bring it out,” Lindell says from the audience as McCandless, Dave Greene and Mark Chuchie wrap their rendition of Take it Easy.
McCandless, 61, said there was a time in his youth where he dreamed of a becoming a folk music star. Now his musical ambitions have changed. He’s focused on using that part of himself to bring people together.
“I think it’s that gift that I was given that that needs to be shared,” he says. “I don’t think I could live without sharing it.”
WATCH | Trio plays song at Eriksdale music shop:
Derrick McCandless, Dave Greene and Mark Chuchie play a cover of The Eagles hit Take it Easy at McCandless and Dawn Mills’s music shop in Eriksdale in March 2024.
- 1 day ago
- News
- Duration 4:42
Joel Jamensky’s sunny disposition explains why the artist with Down syndrome uses the name ‘J-positive’ for his online art business, started with the help of his parents two years ago. “There’s a lot more going on in [Joel’s] art than may be at first glance – just like him,” said his dad, Mark.
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Made Right Here: Woodworking art CTV News Kitchener
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