By Stephanie Vegh

Artist Alanna Young cites three factors in the once-nebulous Show and Tell Gallery’s present iteration on James Street North: “sweet connections and a great opportunity and a willingness to try.”

The fourth cause would be Karli Strohschein who, along with a number of her peers, was frustrated by the dearth of presentation opportunities within McMaster University’s sorely under-funded Studio Art department. Near the end of her third year at McMaster, Strohschein applied to the Summer Company Program offered by the Ministry of Small Business and Entrepreneurship — an initiative that gives small grants and business training for students who want to run their own businesses in the interim summer months of their studies.

Armed with a hard-won grant, Strohschein registered Show and Tell Gallery as a business — an appropriate name, reminiscent of awkward coming-of-age displays of self in an equally awkward classroom environment. Strohschein set up shop on the Hamilton Bayfront at Pier 4. Taking advantage of the same outdoor venue as Sabawoon Bazaar (a market with a mission to nurture the livelihoods of artists and artisans) she exhibited art there during the vacant weekdays. The site proved a sympathetic environment for Strohschein’s project and drew the attention of Jim Chambers and Colleen O’Reilly-Lafferty. The pair quickly leased their James North Studio to Strohschein and eight other artists in a new and improved installment of Show and Tell Gallery.

Compared to those beginnings, the present location at 328 James Street North is a blessing — for starters, it’s indoors. More significantly, the James North Studio was already neatly established within the James North community. Located next door to Bryca Kanbara’s You Me Gallery, the Studio had a reputation for being a prolific exhibitor of local crafts.

Given such an ideal opportunity, Strohschein moved quickly. A week after her initial conversation with Chambers and O’Reilly-Lafferty, she organized a July showing of her work and fellow McMaster artists Carlos Granados-Ocon and Victoria. Another exhibition was assembled for August. By the time Strohschein returned to McMaster in September she had leased the space, which has hosted a staggering twenty-four openings since its summer inception.

The cost of the six-month lease, while favourable to her circumstances as a student, far exceeded the means of Strohschein’s Summer Company grant; ever adaptable, Show and Tell now operates as an artist collective comprised of Strohschein and eight other students from the current graduating group at McMaster: Sara Bardwell, Jocelyn Chen, Bernadette Funk, Carlos Granados-Ocon, Sasha Klein, Chantal Laurendeau, Patrick Leroux and Alanna Young.

Even among nine participants though, the responsibilities of running a gallery — those old reliable pitfalls, Time and Money — are daunting, especially when those nine people are also in the home stretch of a university education. Running Show and Tell Gallery while making art and meeting other curricular demands has been an education in itself. “Art school tends to shelter students from realistic scenarios where we may not have all the time in the world to finish a piece or set up for a show,” explains Granados-Ocon. “With this experience, we have a better idea of the practical, managerial skills that are pivotal in the art practice.”

That work-work balance has come with some hard decisions—namely, the choice to forego weekday gallery hours. This allows the artists to focus their energies on mounting new shows on a weekly basis with an opening event every Friday. The decision, along with the impressive standard of their shows, speaks to Show and Tell’s strength as an engine for art production and evolving dialogue. Much of that success is owed to the mature curatorial decisions evident in the presentations of the individual artists. Praise is also due to the wider community of students who have shown there, including group shows by third-year artists who will hopefully follow Strohschein’s example next year and maintain McMaster’s increasing visibility in Hamilton’s visual arts community.

As a migrant gallery on a street fixated on building permanence and prosperity, Show and Tell has filled a necessary niche in the development of James North as a potentially vital cultural setting. The Gallery moves forward with rapid-fire exhibitions, and values productive presentation over commercial gain. Show and Tell has, without exaggeration, mounted a riskier, more innovative program than many of the seasoned spaces along James Street North. It will leave a considerable gap once Strohschein’s lease on the space expires on February 28 and its artists turn their collective attentions to their graduating show at the McMaster Museum of Art in April. With future collaborations hopeful yet undetermined given those familiar questions of time and space, the group’s only clear legacy will lie largely in the example they have set to students and emerging artists seeking their own place in this evolving community.

Read more from Stephanie Vegh here.