AFTER THE ROYAL ART LODGE at Division Gallery/Arsenal Toronto (45 Ernest), to August 31. 647-346-9082. Rating: NNN
This show catches up with five members of the Royal Art Lodge, the influential Winnipeg collective founded in 1996 and disbanded in 2008. The art school friends’ humorous, often macabre, collaborative drawings gained them international fame and launched their careers.
Since then, a whole generation of artists has taken up their creepy-cute aesthetic, and the kitsch-loving, retro-illustration, childhood-nightmare thing is now getting a bit tired.
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber still collaborate in Winnipeg, while Marcel Dzama has decamped to New York, Jonathan Pylypchuk to L.A. and Adrian Williams to Montreal and Berlin. Despite a level of success that should create a lot of options, the Lodgers haven’t really moved on.
Still, their stuff is hard to resist. Dumontier and Farber’s multi-panel series of small paintings with text are particularly adorable. Animals With Sharpies (also available as a book from Drawn & Quarterly), painted on children’s construction paper, includes a mouse’s missive: “Dear Cat Asshole, How would you like it if I ate your husband?”
In Pylypchuk’s paintings with multi-sentence titles, big-eyed creatures (the type now popularized by Japanese toys) burn in hell. Some three-dimensional big-eyes inhabit a 5-foot-high junk-wood sculpture entitled Check This Shit Out Bitches I Built This All By Myself / But You Have Ghosts / Yeah Ghosts That Suck.
Williams’s The Little Black Horse features faceless Victorian figures being readied for execution on a multi-level scaffold, painted in a children’s illustration style. Elegantly drawn archers, corpses, swords-women, acrobats, dancers and animals populate paintings on paper and a diorama by Dzama.
Artists like Shary Boyle and Daniel Barrow have managed to transcend the limitations of the ironic, demented-teenager idiom using feminist and queer sensibilities and media like ceramics, projection and performance.
Now pushing 40, the Lodgers need some new directions if they want to do mature work. Tellingly, Dumontier once joked about the Lodge, “No one gets in, no one gets out.”
art@nowtoronto.com
