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- - - - SECTION: Books and the Visual Arts; J6 LENGTH: 1355 words HEADLINE: Odd menagerie of archetypes: Marcel Dzama's realm is filled with morphing people, beasts and machines BYLINE: HENRY LEHMANN BODY: Marcel Dzama, a 26-year-old shooting star from Winnipeg, has touched down in Montreal at the Saidye Bronfman Centre's Liane and Danny Taran Gallery, where he has unleashed his amazing miniature- animal act. Featured is an odd cast of people, beasts and machines, all variously grafted together to suggest a kingdom that is not all that peaceable. Pooh meets Pokemon. Dzama's mock-Jungian realm is filled with half-baked archetypes and fully formed cartoon figures. They are a busy lot, what with all the morphing they do, and there's a measure of hilarity to this earthly vision. One especially amusing image depicts a woman being born, fully formed, from a TV screen. In another picture, a tree-like man - or is it a man-like tree - threatens to crush a tiny woman with its roots. Once in a while, Dzama blows things up, as in an image with animals spewing helter-skelter from a tube labeled NASA. That should put a stop to the cow jumping over the moon. Elsewhere in the lineup of drawings, we come across a curious distortion of the story of the Three Bears. It seems a nude woman, painted in sickly flesh tone, has discovered a poker-faced bear in her bed. Still elsewhere, cowboys cavort and the Tin Man proudly rides astride a horse. One recurring emblem in all this is the cigarette, with smoke forming a vertical line. Dzama's flora and fauna are not biologically correct, though with impish elements of both porn and violence never more than a heartbeat away, the works do add up to something not altogether alien to our times. In all of this, there is a hyperactivity of the imagination that is truly childlike. We are reminded of the exuberant thoughts of the 16th-century researcher Ambroise Pare, who set out to illustrate the world of human and not-so-human anomalies; one of his illustrations depicts a creature with a horn on its head and an eye in its scaly knee. But, of course, if Pare's grotesques were created by the wrath of God, those of Dzama seem to be the revenge of TV on an over-fertile mind. Finally, Dzama's visual narrative, for all its bravado, is oddly undisturbing. Instead, what entrances us about the drawings is the poetry in their handling. The incongruity between subject matter and delicate brushwork and drawing is profoundly poignant. More Famous Drawings is funny, uneven, at times inane. If there is a poignancy to this work, it is in the gap between the ultimate banality of the one-dimensional figures and the lyrical beauty of Dzama's painting technique. - Marcel Dzama's More Famous Drawings remains on view at the Liane and Danny Taran Gallery, 5170 Cote Ste. Catherine Rd., until Oct. 29. Information: (514) 739-2301. GRAPHIC: P Photo: COURTESY OF THE LIANE AND DANNY TARAN GALLERY / In Marcel Dzama's mock-Jungian world, cats smoke and bear arms. LOAD-DATE: October 15, 2000 - - - -
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