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"Animals with Sharpies"
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, "Animals with Sharpies," 2013, mixed media on board, 27” x 120”.
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"Animals with Sharpies"
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, "Animals with Sharpies," 2013, mixed media on board, 27” x 120”.
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"Animals with Sharpies"
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, "Animals with Sharpies," 2013, mixed media on board, 27” x 120”.
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"Animals with Sharpies"
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, "Animals with Sharpies," 2013, mixed media on board, 27” x 120”.
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"Animals with Sharpies"
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, "Animals with Sharpies," 2013, mixed media on board, 27” x 120”.
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"Animals with Sharpies"
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, "Animals with Sharpies," 2013, mixed media on board, 27” x 120”.
ROYAL NO MORE
Five years after the Royal Art Lodge’s demise, former members take their own roads (sort of) to fame and fortune.
By Kenton Smith
They came together in Winnipeg every Wednesday night for years to make art. Then they split up.
Six students from the University of Manitoba’s fine arts program – Jonathan Pylypchuk, Adrian Williams, Drue Langlois, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier – founded the Royal Art Lodge collective in 1996, only for individual ambitions to see them drift apart. By 2003, only the latter three continued the weekly ritual; the Lodge finally succumbed in 2008.
Its alumni’s careers, however, hardly rolled over to die in the gutter – the affiliation with one of Canada’s best-known collectives has proved enduring. The collaboration between Dumontier and Farber, in fact, never really stopped (it’s helpful both still live in Winnipeg). Its fruits, much in keeping with the collective’s late trajectory, are included in two volumes by Montreal-based comics publisher Drawn and Quarterly: Constructive Abandonment in 2011 and Animals with Sharpies this year.
The group’s legacy is also echoed by Dzama, who’s become a bona fide art star. Based in New York, he’s been profiled in mainstream media outlets, including The Guardian and The Huffington Post. And, in a near instance of the band getting back together, his recent solo work was included this year in After the Royal Art Lodge at Galerie Division in Montreal and Toronto. The show reunited all but Langlois, who, while moving into animation and continuing to produce visual art, now associates little with the group banner.
“It’s uncommon for visual artists to work together so closely for so long, and with so much success,” says Dominique Toutant, director of Galerie Division in Montreal. Both as the Royal Art Lodge, and individually, there have been exhibitions in Asia and across North America and Europe, as in the case of My Winnipeg, a 2011 exhibition of artists connected to the city at La maison rouge in Paris and Sète, France. That show received an enthusiastic response from French newspaper titans Le Figaro and Le Monde (with Canada’s national media catching on subsequently).
Mary Reid, a former curator at the Winnipeg Art Gallery who oversaw the Royal Art Lodge’s 2007 retrospective, Where Is Here?, summarizes its oeuvre as “hand drawn, quirky, fantastical figures, coupled with text composed of wry comments which touch upon issues ranging from the everyday banalities of life to deeper universal quandaries of the meaning of life.” Understated humour, magic realism, suggested narratives and poignancy that shades into melancholia are other hallmarks.
Zipping back to the present, the international listing magazine, Time Out, recently called Dzama’s “fantasy world” in Puppets, Pawns and Prophets, at London’s David Zwirner gallery, “utterly beguiling.” In Canada, he received the Hnatyshyn Foundation’s 2013 award for outstanding achievement. And a monograph due this fall from U.S. publisher Abrams – including contributions from author Dave Eggers and filmmaker Spike Jonze – considers Dzama’s simple (yet never simplistic) paintings, collages, dioramas, films and sculptures, which feature masked and costumed pageantry, the surreal, the macabre and the kitschy – none mutually exclusive. Farber, 38, says his long personal and creative relationship with Dzama makes it “safe to say” they influenced each other. Evidence can be seen in Farber’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that highlights the supernatural and the anthropomorphic. In more recent work, fanciful, vaguely tragic figures are plainly presented, some with features borrowed from squid, elephants and the like. These days, Farber says a multitude of characters on a single page “is kind of my main image.” He uses the figures to create patterns and geometric arrangements; his conceptual approach is primarily visual, not thematic.
Meanwhile, Dumontier, 38, calls his latest solo work “gently absurdist.” Take such visual gags as Untitled (red sock, right), which illustrates the inherent amusement in a sculpted, single red sock. Other recent examples, part of last year’s A Moon or a Button at Winnipeg’s Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art – called “quietly terrific” by Canadian Art magazine – hint at narrative, or at least offer a glimpse beyond the immediately perceptible, as in Untitled (folded corner) – which is exactly as it reads.
If the Lodge’s work was often minimalist, Dumontier stretches this to the extreme with concrete, non-symbolic images distilled to an understated and amusing clarity. As to his ongoing partnership with Farber, it’s only natural something funny comes out of getting together to make art for fun. Take the snake’s message in Animals with Sharpies: “Baby unhook your jaw I wanna crawl right INSIDE YOU.” The juxtapositions in the book tend to the droll, ironic and absurd, dryly enabled by the precise aesthetic. Still, the work sometimes also turns to the sombre or affecting, and is altogether “definitely coming out of the RAL experience,” Farber says. It’s an approach that still commands attention, with their duets trumpeted in such cultural cornerstones as the American literary magazine, The Believer.
Now living in Los Angeles, Pylypchuk, 40, includes the Royal Art Lodge amongst his most self-representative work. His recent solo efforts are characterized by a certain grottiness: anthropomorphic figures made of trashcans and toilet seats, or representing cigarettes, as in the installation, It’s not you it’s me, at the 2013 Art Los Angeles Contemporary art fair. Earlier works are memorably highlighted by urine and puke frozen in mid-arc as they spew from grotesque sculptures whose roughness also lends a sympathetic quality.
Williams, 38, and living in Berlin, remains influenced by some of his former Lodge brothers, as in the medieval-themed Verses Vs. Verses, which premiered at Toronto’s Neubacher Shor Contemporary gallery last year. It features a pantheon of oddball figures: knights, dandies and Vikings. Accompanying images of hobos and sinking ships, and his primarily deep blue and brown palette, offer a touch of the Lodge’s quintessential melancholia.
Yet of all his one-time comrades, Williams is the most suggestive of magic and wonder, and though he says “no thanks” to whimsy, it’s present in such scenes as a monkey king and his fellow simian explorer sailing skyward (Untitled 2011-2012). If the Lodge’s work was sometimes evocative of children’s book illustrations, Williams’ recent work reminds us how enchanting the best of that can be, without forgoing an adult sensibility.
While some have suggested the Royal Art Lodge is synonymous with a so-called Winnipeg style, Pylypchuk, at least, contends there’s nothing “Winnipeg-ish” about it, or even “inherently Canadian either,” which is precisely why it’s so well received worldwide.
With groups that attain almost mythical status, the question of reunions is perennial. In the case of the Royal Art Lodge, it’s uncertain. Farber, is emphatic about one thing, however: he can’t foresee a day when he’d feel tired of being linked to his former band of brothers. Some ties, it seems, steadfastly bind.
