Image: Warbler Part 7-- Favourite Records, by the Royal Art Lodge
Where is Here?, by the Royal Art Lodge
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Blvd.
To Sept. 2
It's like a scene from some Dr. Seuss book, or the fever dream of a weirdly mature little kid:
A young boy leans against a tree, in mid-conversation with a giant, dark snowman, whose tusk-like nose makes him as happily creepy as any Royal Art Lodge scene.
Their dialogue unfolds thusly:
Snowman: Where did I come from?
Boy: You came from the dark snow that I used to form you.
Snowman: What will be become of me?
Boy: You will melt away in the warmth and return to where you came from.
Snowman: Were there others like me?
Boy: There were two others.
This strange conversation, provided without explanation or context in a small painting, is one of more than a hundred new works by the Royal Art Lodge, on now at the Winnipeg Art Gallery.
Currently made up of three locals--Neil Farber, Michael Dumotier, and Marcel Dzama, who now lives in New York City--the Royal Art Lodge has its roots in the mid-1990's, in the fine arts faculty at the University of Manitoba. In their current form, and with other lineups, they've shown in leading galleries from Los Angeles to New York, Belgium, Italy, Germany, and South Korea.
Almost as intriguing as the work itself is the way it's created. When they can, the Royal Art Lodge make new work in their Wednesday night get-togethers, gatherings of old friends who crank up the tunes, and then crank out some art.
Each work is collaborative, with one artist beginning it, another adding some touches, and the third finishing it off. Only when all three agree that it's done is the work given a library-card date stamp of approval. (In the past, finished work that didn't make the grade has been cheerfully destroyed. A recent exhibit in a swank New York gallery saw Dzama, wearing a giant bear suit, feeding rejected work into a combination platypus/paper shredder.)
Their influence on the hip, young art world is significant, both here and abroad, and it's safe to say that, worldwide, there's now a whole generation of Royal Art Lodge imitators.
So the exhibit's title asks the question: Where is Here?. It's a question about where this art comes, from both geographically and philosophically--where is capital-H "here", after all, in the age of the Internet, reality TV and jet travel, when the centre of our culture is everywhere and nowhere at once?
And where is the "here" of the art itself? What meaning can we find in a creepy snowman talking to his creator, learning about his ultimate fate, and about those who came before him?
What about some of the other works?
In the Girls and Women series, a group of 50 three by three centimetre paintings, one work shows a fluffy yellow chick, freshly hatched, and sitting innocently beneath a caption that reads: Mechanically separated from his parents.
Or witness the 1950's housewife in Marie, complete with cocktail dress and high heels, climbing a riverbank to shoot turtles with a handgun.
Always floating somewhere between humour and polite horror, between wisdom and wit, between child-like simplicity and highly refined skill, the Royal Art Lodge invite us on a journey to wherever "here" is, with their collection of strange, shape-shifting characters.
Take one of the works in Warbler, in which a curious menagerie of a pig, a weasel, a snake, a mouse, a turtle, and a bird, sit listening to a record player. The text explains that they're listening to the bird's favourite record--Candles in the Rain, by Melanie.
Like so much of their work, it's silly and absurd, and while parallels could be seen to literary works like Charlotte's Web, or Animal Farm, we're given almost nothing in the way of context, other than the rest of their art.
So who are these friendly animals, and what compels them to gather around a record player, taking turns listening to each other's favourite albums?
Everything about it, like so much of the exhibit, brings to mind the Royal Art Lodge themselves--a strange, unlikely grouping of animals, coming together to listen to each other's music and, in doing so, creating something entirely new.
