Royal Art Lodge

Where is here? The Royal Art Lodge knows. Childhood ain’t what it used to be. Parents are mostly absent, well, fathers certainly are, and mothers foster the kind of benign neglect that allows children to sport wings, have private reveries, cavort with enchanted trees and perform open-heart surgery. In the garden are elephants, weasels, turtles, mice, cats and snakes. They have plans. It’s the camaraderie of strange bedfellows and the heightened individuation of interior monologues or omnipotent narrators. Technology is retrograde. We are at the cusp of Modernism, characterized by the washing machine, the electric vacuum, the revolver, the bow and arrow and simple writing implements, but it’s a modernism of multiple frailties within the shadow of eventual destruction. When it’s urban, it’s claustrophobic; when it’s nature, all weird genetic mutations and malfunctions are apt to rear. Meta-narratives of hope writ large, of progress, of laughable mastery over nature and of Humanity with a capital “H” have been displaced. In their stead, a deliberate return to wonderment, acts of tenderness or violence, and the momentary.

There is much to behold. The show of small, smaller and even tinier works, curated by the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Mary Reid, forces a contrast between the expectant architecture of the gallery and the understated address of the paintings. The viewer becomes self-consciously aware of the intimacies required in viewing and reading the works at the same time: plot line and curve line; denouement inflected by grey. The works mirrors this self-consciousness.

Viewing the multiple series of works, some fresh from the studio, and single works borrowed from North American and European collections, I am reminded of my childhood literature: lavishly illustrated stories of elves and fairies with impossibly beautiful sugar plums, and cautionary tales by Edward Gorey; or that of my son: the ludicrous Rupert Annual where plot unfolds through verse and frame, and implausible narratives and eccentric personalities converge. Something sinister is always around the corner. The hills have eyes and all that.

What holds our attention in the work of the Royal Art Lodge, and particularly in the 50 panels of the new “Women and Children” series, are the gorgeous lines, the carefully drawn forms—the wee brush strokes that create recession into depth on the forehead of a child. The Royal Art Lodge is ever faithful to its collective moments of insight and transformation. The pre-eminence of their feeling and thinking is heightened, structured through working habits of planned accidents and happenstance. The collaborations occur across the mail and in shared rooms, with the assistance of digital technology. In this respect, they are not unlike a multinational fi rm of post-nuclear Surrealists. Finished pictures or projects are finalized, approved and so designated by a stamp indicating the date.

The reality bites and advice to the lovelorn or shell-shocked (“Understand that you will not always see eye to eye with your daughter”) are a curious and compelling mix. The anachronistic drawing style and subdued colours are a little nostalgic. From the lassitude of the characters, a kind of anti-industry emerges. Not that these lodgers aren’t industrious. They are all industry. Look, for example, at the 15-part drawing, The Final Problem, 2006, made of repurposed collaged elements that make up a mountain, along whose steep incline a myth of Sisyphus is re-enacted. Heads will roll. Futility, yes, but a gorgeous, deadpan futility.

The experience of the show is cumulative. There is not any one work that makes this an outstanding show, though it is that. My favourite is the 50 tiny panels of “Women and Children” of 2007. Yet, there are many single images throughout the show that feel like badges, icons or emblems I should own or display, not merely because they are stunning in their execution or exact in their delineation of a moment, but because they possess a deep and sustained urgency portrayed with a considered calm. Take the child performing open-heart surgery, or the portrait of a girl against the excruciating backdrop of items ingested and calories contained. It’s obsessive, painful and acute. What of the small fi gure with angel wings reading from a holy book, imploring, “Please pay attention to my words and not my wings”? The old guy with peas and carrots in his beard? Or the seated girl sombrely crafting a sign that says, “FUCK OFF”? The success of these works, the best of these works, turns on the instantaneity of limited hope and certain disappointment, beauty of detail and stoic humour. The consummate skills in colour, line, illusionist depth and design persuade the viewer of dysfunctions that disrupt normalities, the manias that signify cracks in this edifice.

The many series in the show, such as “All in a Week,” 2006, or “Warbler,” 2005, function more as dispersed one-liners. In many of the series, it’s as if we have stumbled into follies in the garden, the midsection of a horror flick, Jean Cocteau’s claustrophobic world of French apartments, or multiple, preposterous premises of several postmodern novels. But where a previous generation may have sloughed off their neuroses and insecurities as insular or narcissistic, the Royal Art Lodge makes these anxieties their fervent objects. The Lodge, whose potent myth of primitive and romanticized origins would rival any Blaue Reiter clubhouse, currently includes Neil Farber, Michael Dumontier and Marcel Dzama.

Where is here? I am beginning to recognize this place. ■

“Where Is Here?,” curated by Mary Reid, was exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from June 30 to September 2, 2007.

Amy Karlinsky writes, curates and teaches from Winnipeg.