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- - - - SECTION: ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. 27 LENGTH: 510 words HEADLINE: WINNIPEG ARTIST SCORES ANOTHER COUP BYLINE: BY JOHN KENDLE BODY: Very few Winnipeggers outside this city's visual arts community know the name Marcel Dzama. They should, though, because Dzama, at just 28, has quickly become one of our hottest visual artists. His exquisitely eccentric drawings have caught on in the haughty atmosphere of the New York and L.A. art scenes in recent years, and his work has been shown around the world. Harper's magazine has featured the young artist, and Saturday Night magazine and the Globe & Mail have used his illustrations Now Dzama is linked to a more mainstream name -- that of Nick Hornby, the British journalist-turned-novelist whose books Fever Pitch, High Fidelity and About a Boy have all been turned into feature films. Hornby's latest work is Songbook, a collection of essays on 31 of his favourite songs (music is a theme and subtext in all his work) -- and Winnipeg's Dzama is the guy who got the call to illustrate the North American edition, published by McSweeney's, a cutting-edge New York house. "I'm working on a book of my own with McSweeney's and then I got the call to do this job," explains the soft-spoken Dzama from his Corydon Village home. "I didn't even get to meet Nick Hornby. I had three or four days to do 48 illustrations, and I just did some caricatures of the artists and then some more to go with what the songs were about. The cover was made to look like the cover of a mix tape that Hornby might make for his friends." Exquisitely bound, Songbook (released as 31 Songs in the U.K.) also contains a CD featuring several of the tunes Hornby extols in the book. Dzama had the chance to meet the author when a show of Dzama's work was opening in London, but they missed each by an hour or so, he says. Songbook should put Dzama's name in front of people who might not necessarily know he's from Winnipeg, and here's hoping his own book, a reproduction of one of his scrapbook/journals to be called The Berlin Years ("The title's got nothing to do with anything," he laughs), catches on. It's slated for publication by McSweeney's in April. Dzama -- who is a member of Winnipeg's Royal Art Lodge, a group of friends who began by gathering weekly in a hotel room to create drawings -- says he has been able to make a living as a visual artist for the past six years and so was able to donate his $4,800 fee for Songbook to Hornby's charity, the Treehouse Trust. He spends 75% of his time in Winnipeg, where he has studio space in the Exchange District. He has a show on view in Philadelphia with fellow Art Lodger Michael Demontier and has shows of his own coming up at the prestigious Whitney Museum in New York and at the Richard Hiller Gallery in L.A. LOAD-DATE: March 18, 2003 - - - -
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