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- - - - SECTION: Arts & Life; At The Galleries; Pg. A9 LENGTH: 854 words HEADLINE: A young artist who is just like a drawing machine SOURCE: The Leader-Post BYLINE: Jack Anderson BODY: Marcel Dzama: most famous drawings Susan Whitney Gallery until March 13 - - - - Riffing visually and conceptually off of the soft and gentle drawings of cherubic children and anthropomorphized animals found in moralistic children's books, the boldly outlined illustrations of comic books that depict powerful dual-identitied superheroes, and even cheesy 1950's sci-fi movie stills, where middle America is terrorized by actors in cheap monster costumes, Winnipeg artist Marcel Dzama darkly subverts our nostalgias by trolling through what are ostensibly the benign iconographies of our childhoods. Sourcing his imagery specifically in the pop culture of youth as it was constructed during the first half of the 20th century, he lifts both its cute generic characters and its antique drawing styles all the way from then to now, to the wiser and more cynical present, confusing childhood innocence with adult experience and forcing disenchantment from enchantment. Dzama is the 28-year-old hot-shot Winnipeg illustrator who has achieved something approaching star status in the Canadian art scene over the past three or four years, based largely on positive reviews in the most serious of art journals in the U.S.A. and on the expert marketing skills of his dealers, all the way from New York to Los Angeles. A prolific artist, who, by his own estimate, compulsively churns out over 100 drawings a month, Dzama works in black ink, watercolor and root beer on 10-by-13-inch sheets of ordinary rough manila paper, which, with apparent anti-high art insouciance, he crams into an old suitcase in his studio when complete. However, his rapid rise in status is matched only by the increased value of his drawings, which just a few years ago were displayed tacked by pushpins to the wall and were available for around $25 each, but are now elegantly framed and retail for something closer to $1,000. Locating his tiny figures outside of any context within the big empty expanse of creamy white drawing paper, and thus clearly denying any narrative reading, Dzama's half-ironic, half-dead-serious drawings hum blithely with an undercurrent of threat and malice. In his darkly comic psychological pas de deux of confusion, he typically pairs a suffering or isolated or blase or defenceless or blankly oblivious young male or female figure against a creepy other, who takes the form of an animal or an animate tree or an angry crowd or the Tin Man or even a grown-up. Although it is tempting to read the human character in these pairs as the good guy, we can never be sure, for not only are these monstrous characters depicted threatening or opposing the ordinary human character, but are themselves occasionally threatened or opposed by the human charaters as well. For example, a leafless tree with legs that is clearly a costume worn by an adult in cognito walks past a boy who waves his hat, either out of the forced conventions of politeness or in apparent recognition of this malevolently Disney-esque character. But we must ask here: Who is hiding from whom? In another, a nude woman, her hair cut in the flapper style of the 1920's, sits opposite a standing bear who is either taking his suit coat off or putting it on. Opposing the blithe drawing styles that culture reserves exclusively for children's books, by depicting events not at all carefree but rather curious and in some cases even adult-smarmy, Dzama, like Surrealists before him, constructs crystalline territories, not of sweet childhood fantasy but of nightmarish perplexity where nothing is quite what it appears to be and, in Dzama's case, everyone is either a feckless misfit, mutant, loser or pervert. While his characters' body gestures and complex facial expressions seem to infuse the scene with meaning, there is no clear reading of Dzama's images. He himself suggests (somewhat disingenuously, I think) that he does not know most of the time what he is trying to get at in many of them. Yet it seems to me there is something quite diaristic about every one of them. Clearly, he is doodling around through his own personal history, representing real people known to him. To the viewer, though, these figures remain ciphers, representative of various personality types, psychological states, attitudes and world views. Dzama's often repeated cast of characters, then -- some of whom represent himself -- find themselves operating in what we can best be described as ambiguous psychosexual melodramas, ambiguous political satires, and ambiguous personal diatribes. Depicting confusion and, further, by promoting a sense of confusion in the viewer, Dzama's images read like plates taken from a collection of po-mo fairy tales. It is understandable that these untitled drawings have have found a receptive audience in the lofts of Soho and the condos of SoCal, given that they are not too too disturbing and that their charming aesthetic qualities might provide just the right decorator touch of off-beat in-ness. But instead of conjuring up a hazy sense of malaise, I'd like Dzama to provide us with a bit more bite, myself. GRAPHIC: Photo: Marcel Dzama, untitled, mixed media on paper LOAD-DATE: February 27, 2002 - - - -
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