- - - - Copyright 2003 Sun Media Corporation
- - - - SECTION: Entertainment; Pg. D8 LENGTH: 504 words HEADLINE: ART DARLINGS ALL FOR ONE BYLINE: CP BODY: Their studio, a drab, one-storey brick building plunked down on the fringe of Winnipeg's warehouse district, is a mess, admits Marcel Dzama, the de facto leader of the Royal Art Lodge, a troupe of six young artists well established as the darlings of Canadian contemporary art. Lovingly hand-sewn dolls, puppets, costumes and makeshift, homemade musical instruments are strewn from one end of the cramped space to the next. Storyboards for puppet shows and videos are scattered throughout. Then, of course, there are the drawings -- thousands upon thousands of them -- the Royal Art Lodge's raison d'etre, and the creative glue that binds them. "Nobody really wants to clean it up," says Dzama with a slightly embarrassed laugh. "It has just been too busy." Indeed, the Lodge has had plenty to occupy itself. The group -- Dzama, 28, his sister Hollie Dzama, 18, their uncle Neil Farber, 27, brothers Drue, 30, and Myles Langlois, 26, and Michael Dumontier, 28 -- is showing their work at New York's prestigious Drawing Center. They even made the New York Times on the weekend as part of a story about art collectives. The touring exhibition presents them as just what they've always been: a prodigious, unified, breezily happy collective whole. The show, Ask The Dust, will also be at the Power Plant in Toronto from March 22 to May 25. In New York, individual works are interspersed with pieces done truly collectively -- whimsical, often fantastical drawings contributed to by all of the members in a surrealist fashion: Draw a bit, pass it on, pick up another drawing, add to it, and pass it on again. The finished drawings are date-stamped, not signed and credited to the group as a whole. "It's not really about the individual," says Dzama. "It's anonymous. It's nice that way." If there is one thing Dzama himself is not, though, it's anonymous. And each of his colleagues has earned individual renown. Hollie, Marcel's 18-year old sister, has a fan club. Marcel's drawings, coaxed from an imagination populated by tin men, gun-wielding bears, ill-tempered trees, gun molls and nasty elves, have sold in vast quantities (6,000 and counting) since 1997, including some to such notable clients as Jim Carrey, Nicolas Cage, Steve Martin and Drew Carey. The going rate is about $900 (Cdn), though some are listed for as much as $3,000. The numbers alone make him the most successful export in Canadian contemporary art, but his commitment to the group has never wavered. "Marcel for years was the one who was saying, 'Well, no, Drue is the one that can really draw, and Michael is the one that conceives of the big projects together.' And we were saying, 'Oh sure, Marcel, right,' " says Wayne Baerwaldt, the director of the Power Plant in Toronto, and the exhibition's co-curator. "But as I've looked over their work, putting this show together, you see each of them having quite an individual voice. There's not necessarily a need to collaborate, but an active willingness to do so." GRAPHIC: photo of MARCEL DZAMA LOAD-DATE: January 22, 2003 - - - -
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