Marcel Dzama: Moving Picture

Timothy Taylor Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Canadian artist Marcel Dzama. For his third exhibition at the gallery, Dzama will be showing a 30-minute film, The Lotus Eaters in a specially installed mini-cinema at 21 Dering Street.
 
The Lotus Eaters tells the story of an artist driven insane by the death of his wife. The artist tries to bring her back to life by drawing a fantasy world inhabited by his wife and a variety of creatures. He is killed by his doppelgänger and enters the fantasy world. Once inside this parallel universe, the creatures attack him and his wife comes to the rescue. Shot in black and white, without dialogue, and accompanied by a 1940s soundtrack, the film is reminiscent of Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929).
 
I’ve been making films since I was a kid. I had a Fisher Price Pixel Vision camera that I got when I was 12. The first thing I remember filming was a stop motion animation with creatures I had made out of plasticine.
Marcel Dzama, 2007
 
The Lotus Eaters brings to life the cast of characters Dzama has been drawing since his childhood. The long, dark, cold Winnipeg winters meant that Dzama spent a lot of time inside drawing a dystopian world inhabited by femmes fatale, bats, bears, cowboys and superheroes. Tree people, masked women and hybrids of humans, animals and plants evoke Ovid’s Metamorphoses. A selection of costumes and photo-collages from the film will also be displayed. Despite a wide range of influences from literature and art history, the film, costumes and photo-collages in this exhibition are unmistakably and uniquely Dzama.