Scenes from the House Dream has formed the nexus of David Hoffos’ studio practice for the past five years and serves as a compendium of the artist’s signature new/old media techniques, which have been perfected over 17 years of art production.
David Hoffos’ ongoing practice explores the uncanny and its relationship to the everyday; he creates narratives that transcend time and place. The artist’s use of low-tech paraphernalia to produce illusions of reality has contributed to an entirely original body of work. The subject matter of this recent masterwork represents a move away from the outward-looking spectacle to a more personal examination of the human psyche.
In Scenes from the House Dream, as with all previous work, Hoffos forms a pact with the viewer; he asks us to suspend disbelief and enter his world. What we find there may both disturb and delight.
The series is a meandering journey. The experiment was to see if I could take an idea and live with it for five years and to see what comes from that. The process is a bit of a leap, but it has also been a way of developing techniques that were fairly crude in my work in the ‘90s. Now I feel these ideas are getting dialed in. I have always thought that artists should give themselves a sort of second childhood; when they go to art school and think maybe that making art is what they want to pursue, they’re being born. As they learn, they develop technique and craft, they start to enter an adolescence. In my work, I feel like I’ve just come out of my adolescence. Maybe the works I’m doing now are the first adult things that I’ve done.
From an Interview with Glenn Lowry, West Coast Line 50, Staging Vernaculars, p. 86, Vol. 40, No. 2, CAG, 2007.
David Hoffos was born in Montreal. He continued his education in Australia and Alberta, earning a BFA with Great Distinction from the University of Lethbridge in 1994. He currently lives in Lethbridge and is the recipient of grants awarded by the Banff Centre Studio Residency Program, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Canada Council for the Arts. In 2002, he was awarded a Sobey Prize. His work has been exhibited across Canada and in Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, and the USA.
He is represented by TrépanierBaer Gallery in Calgary.
Curated by Shirley Madill, this exhibition has been organized and circulated by Rodman Hall Art Centre/Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario with the assistance of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge and TrepanierBaer Gallery, Calgary.
The funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council and TrépanierBaer Gallery is gratefully acknowledged.
