David Hoffos

David Hoffos’s “Scenes From the House Dream,” a multi-part project he began working on two years ago, was inspired by a dream about a house, but it is also an inspired metaphor. For the dream is a metaphor for film, the house for interior space, and the house dream for Bachelard’s “oneric house, a house of dream-memory”—a site of childhood reverie, the wellspring of creativity. “It’s not really about my dreams,” says the 38-year-old, Lethbridge-based artist, who has not read Bachelard, “as much as it is about dreaming and archetypal dreams and archetypal imagery.”

Hoffos, whose work has been steeped in film and film genres, is developing the project, which eventually will be called “The House Dream,” in five phases. Each phase will comprise four or five scenes presented as miniature models. The models are viewed one at a time through frames mounted at eye level in a long wall in a dark gallery The spectator looks into them through a glass. Each one is a small, vividly detailed, encapsulated world, whose jewel-like light and colour, and the recurring movements of small illuminated figures, create the intense surreality of a dream.

Hoffos likens “Scenes From the House Dream” to “a nocturnal zoo exhibit; you go in and hear the sounds of life. Or a dark aquarium.” And, well he might: like the objects of his analogues, the scenes invoke a sense of wonder and mystery. Also, at this stage in their development, they are united more by their architecture than by the connective tissue of narrative content.

“The scenes aren’t in their proper order yet,” Hoffos explains. “They will be in order when ‘The House Dream’ is complete. It’s my clumsy way of making a narrative at this point.”

In this regard, the new models or “scenes” function somewhat like storyboards at the same time that they allude to scenes from a film. They are related to Parlour, 1998, a tabletop dollhouse model Hoffos made for a show in Spain about Houdini and fakery—the first work into which he projected small moving figures. Hoffos is making them in clusters, in no particular order.

Two phases of the project are now complete. Phase One was shown last year at TrépanierBaer Gallery, which has committed to seeing this large project through to completion. Phase Two appeared this year, in the spring. Airships, an overhead view of a zeppelin floating high above a lit-up city spreading out below, began Phase One, 2003, and was followed by Circle Street, a claustrophobic, symmetrical suburban street on which a boy is riding his bicycle while fireworks explode overhead in the black sky; Parlour (Golf), a living room in which a man practises his putt in the firelight in front of a fireplace, while a giant boy plays hide and go seek in the hallway; and Airstream, a wooded campsite in which a young woman steps out of her trailer to look around and goes back inside, having failed to see the ghostly apparition that has drawn her outside.

At the end of the row of scenes, the dim figure of a life-size woman, a cut-out illusion made by projecting a moving video image onto a cut-out wooden shape, sweeps the floor with a broom. Hoffos always adds elements to an installation that exist in the scale and space of the real world, otherworldly doppelgangers of the spectators. In this woman’s figure, perhaps, there is an allusion to the passage of time.

Airstream, 2003, links the first two phases of “The House Dream” installations. The last scene of Phase One, it is also the first scene of Phase Two, followed by the moody, film-noir 65 Footers, 2003, a pleasure yacht on which a woman paces the deck of the boat tied up at the dock, but doesn’t see the giant squid lurking underneath it; Airport Hotel, 2004, a modernist hotel room in which a woman smokes a cigarette, has a drink, changes the channel on the television, and then puts on her robe, while airplanes taxi by on a runway outside her window; and Absinthe Bar, 2004, a life-size cut-out illusion of a ghostly woman. Seen through a doorway, the woman sits alone at a table, sipping a drink. Outside the door is a very realistic orange cat and a life-size woman, who takes out a pad and makes notes, two more cut-out illusions that bridge the spaces of the imagined and real worlds.

The overall mood of the installation is a sense of disquietude, as if something eerie and not entirely perceptible is afoot. Each of the models has a subtle sound element, the call of a loon, the lapping of waves, ice cubes clattering in a glass and a single, ominous musical tone. As an ensemble, the scenes speak to anxiety, watchfulness, ennui—waiting for something to happen, while their actions play out in an endless loop. A woman keeps coming out of the trailer to check for signs of an intruder, nervously walks the deck of the yacht, paces the rug of the hotel room floor, takes another sip of her drink, makes another note on her pad.

The places depicted in the “Scenes” are on the edges of the city; instead of in the suburbs that so often are the setting for Hoffos’s work. He chose Airstream as the link between the installations because “it was the one I felt could set the mood; that was the one that was on the edge of town,” he says. “They’re all on the edges—the docks, the airport, the campground. It’s like a dangerous space, unpoliced, beyond the suburbs. Growing up in the suburbs like I did, you didn’t have to go too far to be in the wilderness.”

The wilderness one enters in “Scenes From the House Dream,” for the moment at least, would seem to be the psychological. The story will emerge: Phase Three will appear in the spring, 2005, at TrépanierBaer, followed by phases Four and Five.

Perhaps the house is the self, Hoffos muses. “I’m keeping it pretty mysterious, even to myself. I don’t know the whole story. If I did, I don’t think I’d make the work. I’m telling this story to myself.” ■

“David Hoffos: Scenes From the House Dream: Phase Two” exhibited at TrépanierBaer Gallery in Calgary from April 2 to May 8, 2004.

Nancy Tousley is a writer and critic who lives in Calgary.