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- - - - SECTION: Mix; E19 LENGTH: 725 words HEADLINE: Drawing on whimsy: Marcel Dzama unleashes his free-floating imagination in a new show. BYLINE: Michael Scott BODY: MORE FAMOUS DRAWINGS Recent work by Marcel Dzama Belkin Art Gallery, 1825 Main Mall (University of B.C.), until Dec. 3. Marcel Dzama, a young Winnipeg artist, was in beaming attendance at the opening of his show at the Belkin Art Gallery earlier this month. While art patrons circulated with catalogues tucked beneath their well-tailored sleeves, a young staff member was telling people that Dzama would be happy to sign the books and make a drawing on a blank page for anyone who cared to ask him. At no charge. That offhand gesture says a lot about Dzama's attitude toward his art. The young man is on a steep trajectory toward success -- exhibited at international art fairs, represented by one of New York's most progressive dealers, David Zwirner (who also represents Stan Douglas), and now the subject of a flattering solo show at the Belkin, a first-rate gallery by any standard. Dzama's unframed drawings sell for about $600 in New York. There is no mistaking the urgency and breadth of the 26-year-old Dzama's success. So why is he giving away work at his big opening? The gesture has a lot to do with the unbearable lightness of being that pervades Dzama's art. His strange, macabre drawings are certainly high art -- witness the big-city exhibitions and fancy dealers. But Dzama is busy discounting them at the same time as others place a value on them. He uses root beer as a pigment. Composition is purposefully awkward and naive. Even the title of the show, More Famous Drawings, has an ironic ring to it, given the scrabbly, faintly disposable quality of these works. The central feature of Dzama's drawings is the sense that every one of them is an illustration snatched from the middle of a complicated narrative. As Winnipeg-based curator Wayne Baerwaldt points out, the drawings themselves swim in empty space, like cartoon characters plucked from their proper panel. And what characters they are. ''Vaguely recognizable figures are granted a half life in Dzama's bizarre, broken narratives,'' Baerwaldt writes. ''Each figure is an opportunity for viewers to contemplate a range of disparate subjects like Spiderman, faux film-noir scenes, absurd Surrealist scenes, the Wizard of Oz, mutant Inuit forms, The Grapes of Wrath, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's City of Lost Children, E.T., a multitude of 1950 sci-fi sets or many other sources from high and low forms of culture.'' Mutant Inuit forms? Indeed, there are a tribe of small, round, parka-clad creatures in some of the drawings. The talking, apple-flinging trees from the Wizard of Oz are another group, as are bears and rabbits and crocodiles, all anthropomorphized to one degree or another. Sometimes human beings, wearing their scatological or sexual desires on their sleeves, get into the act as well, as in Dzama's image of a miniature gunslinger crawling out of a nude woman's genitals, shooting at his rival in the distance. Despite the awkward composition and the almost insouciant quality of draftsmanship (you might expect daydreaming teenage boys to draw like this), Dzama's work is in fact precise and immaculate. People at the opening of Dzama's show, many of them art-world insiders, were asking one another: Do you get this? So elusive is the work on some levels that it can seem like an elaborate hoax -- especially in the hallowed precincts of the Belkin gallery, with its reputation for post-conceptual rigor. People were actually laughing out loud at the opening, a response that serious art almost never elicits. And yet despite the lightheartedness, Dzama's tiny, bizarre characters keep calling you back. Why are there so many legless action heroes, plucked from a Boy's Own Life adventure? Why is that Papa bruin force-feeding honey to a family of rabbits? Why is Amelia Earhart flying away on a fat, eight-legged hare? Each of the 100 drawings in this exhibition raises its own strange questions. Baerwaldt says Dzama strips his images of all ''extenuating circumstances, including political and philosophical pretension.'' Maybe this is the secret to their allure. Maybe there is nothing else here but what you see -- no encoded art theory, no deep undertones, no advanced semiotic meaning -- just pictures blowing through a young artist's imagination. Now, how refreshing is that? mscott@pacpress.southam.ca GRAPHIC: P Photo: From More Famous Drawings, an exhibition of Marcel Dzama's recent work at UBC's Belkin Art Gallery. LOAD-DATE: October 21, 2000 - - - -
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