Mark Dicey: Making His Mark

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Calgary artist Mark Dicey has brought both dedication and infectious energy to a wide range of creative interests over the last 35 years, earning his stripes as an artist’s artist. In 2002, he was awarded both the Alumni Award of Excellence by the Alberta College of Art and Design and The Order of Black Belt in Thinking, the latter perhaps the more coveted honour. Presented by Chuck Stake, of Chuck Stake Enterprizes, a.k.a. Don Mabie, a mail artist, trading-card guru and longtime ringmaster in Calgary’s lively alternative scene, it speaks to Dicey’s pivotal role, as both an artist and a community builder. Mabie recalls Dicey’s tremendous commitment to his creative practice. “When I first got to know him, he was drawing, painting, making collages, creating installations, doing performance art on his own and collaborating with other artists,” says Mabie. “He has developed into one of the finest artists I know with an excellent body of work to his credit.”

Dicey’s strongest focus these days is painting. He’s preparing for the largest solo exhibition of his career, Each Painted Document, from Feb. 1 to April 7 at the Nickle Galleries at the University of Calgary. A concurrent show is running Feb. 9 to March 10 at the Jarvis Hall Gallery in Calgary. When Michele Hardy, a curator at the Nickle, invited Dicey to participate in the show’s development, he wanted to highlight the processes that fuel his practice. His daily work, the drawings and collages he makes in the sketchbooks he carries wherever he goes, will be on display, some 60 books in all. There are 11 new drawings that radiate with colour and a wall installation of approximately 200 small “papers” made during a residency last summer at the Banff Centre. Renewing his interest in collaboration, Dicey also concocted a sculpture, the cleverly titled waltermark, made with fellow Calgary artist Walter May, whose retrospective runs concurrently at the Nickle.

Dicey stretched himself for this show, creating his largest-ever paintings. “The key for me in this process was to keep an open structure,” he says. “They terrify me, but I love them. I didn’t want to be afraid of doing things that were rawer, more on the edge, more unresolved.” To him, each painting has a mood, somewhat like music. While one is quiet, another is busy. One is lyrical, another dissonant or complexly layered. The canvases were too large to stretch in the limited space of his studio. When he completes that final step in the gallery, he’ll see them as discrete objects for the first time. His titles, as always, are a simple notation of their order in his inventory and the date of completion.

Dicey begins the game, as he puts it, on the floor drawing on his paper or canvas with conté. He moves each piece to the wall to work with acrylic paint, and then perhaps back to the floor, spinning its orientation to check the composition. His sense of compositional balance develops from physical interaction.

His studio process becomes a form of unrehearsed performance, where action, memory and materials come together. With sure-handed calligraphy, he defines edges, sets the rhythm and proposes routes for the eye to travel. As he builds his works, his paint, by turns, is transparent, spattered, dripping, opaque, buttery or dry. While drawing, he often works back and forth using conté and collaged elements, building the surface and concentrating the material physicality into a rich, visceral object.

Although they read as abstractions, the drawings can also convey a sense of the body, perhaps because of their gestural make-up, or perhaps because of the ephemeral materials. The shaped drawing, 2480-VII-2017, is a prime example, eliciting the presence of a human back. The outer architecture of the large dark mass repeats in the brightly filled inner arch. The contrast of delicate but swiftly drawn and painted lines on the edges adds to the feeling of movement and life.

Dicey is emphatic that the abstract shapes and colour relationships echo his daily observations. Walking, running and driving are part of his routine, giving him time to absorb visual information. He jots down observations, collects collage materials and snatches impressions of particular moments in his sketchbooks. He doesn’t use them as source material for other work, but they bolster his visual vocabulary.

Pushing boundaries and taking risks has been part of Dicey’s process since he graduated from ACAD in 1983. His piece for the graduating show is legendary. Before the doors opened, he had himself buried in two feet of soil with a small breathing apparatus. He remained motionless for the entire evening. A fellow student, Christian Eckart, unobtrusively watched to make sure he was safe, but many people doubted he was actually there.

Dicey, born and raised in Calgary, grew up in a family interested in the arts. He remembers his mother, Nancy, attending summer sessions in painting and ceramics at the Banff Centre in the late ’60s. At school, he played in rock bands. He quickly became an accomplished percussionist and taught at the Johnny Cruse Drum Shop and Studio. Composers Steve Reich, John Zorn and John Cage were important to him musically. As an art student, he was inspired by Joseph Beuys, Carolee Schneemann and Chris Burden. But Marion Nicoll and Ron Moppett were role models closer to home, confirming that art could be a profession. As a young artist, he was active in Calgary’s experimental artist-run centres. He knew early he didn’t need to fit one mold.

For his Nickle exhibition, Dicey acknowledges and reveals his multiple streams by dipping into them again: performance, installation, assemblage and collaboration. Around the time of the 1988 Calgary Olympics, for instance, he was in a group exhibition, Elemental Instincts: A Matter of Course, curated by Donna McAlear at the Nickle Arts Museum. It was a time when Calgary wanted to be known as a world-class city. The exhibition took romanticism out of the mix, countering with a lineup of hard-hitting regional artists who deserved world-class attention. Dicey constructed a survivalist installation centred around a military tent, Habitable Putresce, and delivered a gritty, physically demanding improvised performance in a seemingly post-apocalyptic space.

Dicey plans to present one element of that installation, a huge swathe of black velvet, on a wall of the Nickle. He has begun drawing on the fabric with a white oil stick and will continue work in the gallery by adding assemblages, his versions of sculptural ready-made collages.

In the ’80s and ’90s, Dicey optimized collaborative synergy, whether in group or duo projects. One was the 1989 performance of dearth (by means of the senses) with Cheryl L’Hirondelle as part of the exhibition Noise Under the Tongue at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre. Another was ckmd preformed, a month-long 1995 residency with Colleen Kerr at TRUCK, a Calgary artist-run centre.

Dicey was a member of the SKEP(tic)KS, along with Geoff Hunter, Grant Poier, Chuck Stake, Cori Stent and Jeff Viner. Their freewheeling actions took many forms. In 1997, for instance, they were asked by Calgary’s Glenbow Museum to respond to Marcel Duchamp: Dustballs and Readymades, Etc., a touring show from the National Gallery of Canada. They appeared as a team of faux security guards.

Dicey cultivates his connections with the Calgary community in innumerable ways. He has taught at ACAD, worked as a gallery technician with the Petro-Canada collection and the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, and done curatorial work at various artist-run centres. He has served on the boards of arts groups and managed fellow artist Jeff Viner’s estate after his 1998 death. Dicey also co-founded the Elephant Artist Relief, a fund that supports Calgary artists who need emergency help for health issues and other crises.

Since 2000, Dicey has been part of a collaborative drawing group, drunken paw. He has played in four noise bands (Street of Crocodiles, Tomato Tomato, tokyosexwhale and scum de terre). He also runs his own business, Sure Art Installations. He and his wife, Gisa, have raised two children, Alyson and Shawn, who are starting careers of their own, Alyson as an actress, and Shawn as a musician and video artist. ■

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