Famed art collective celebrated with show at U of M

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This article was published 10/12/2024 (661 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A cartoonish figure clad in a green dress extends her (its?) hand, holding a lit cigarette, to three light blobby figures, one of which is several times larger than the other two.

Two other smaller blob-type figures stand behind the central character.

A drawing next to that shows a man in a fedora, a smoking cigarette dangling from his lowered left hand, facing a rotund slime-covered creature with a diamond ring on the back of its extended goo-dripping right arm.

There’s a weird, whimsical quality to the drawings, which are but two of the 56 works of art — including sculpture, drawings, zines and more — in a new exhibit, Kidult Club: The Collaborative Kinetics of the Royal Art Lodge, ca.Y2K, on display at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery until Jan. 17.

Most of the artwork was donated to the school by Vancouver collector Maryon Adelaar, notes Oliver Botar, associate director, graduate programs, and research professor at the School of Art.

School of Art students Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, Jon Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams founded the Royal Art Lodge in 1996.

Tasked by instructor (and renowned local artist) Diana Thorneycroft to “do something nice” for an assignment, the six students offered free haircuts, shoeshines and artworks to passers-by at the U of M Student Union Building, and soon began getting together on Wednesday evenings to make art together.

The group continued to meet weekly long after graduation and grew to include additional collaborators Shelley Dick, Hollie Dzama (sister of Marcel), Eli Horowitz and Myles Langlois (brother of Drue).

“During the Wednesday night get-togethers, members of the Royal Art Lodge would let their imaginations run wild,” Botar says.

“They would often play cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), the collaborative art-making game developed by André Breton and the Surrealists during the 1920s, with one member starting a drawing and others adding to it until an often hilarious and sometimes disturbing finished product would emerge.”

This resulted in a body of work combining individual artists’ style and subject matter in unexpected, creative ways, adds Blair Fornwald, director/curator of the School of Art Gallery.

Works were collectively attributed to the group; in lieu of a signature, they were completed with a date stamp.

The Royal Art Lodge members were impressively prolific, creating thousands of drawings and works in a wide range of media, including watercolours, collages, sculptures (especially dolls), zines, illustrations, videos and music.

“These artworks were created at the onset of the internet age. I’m about the same age (as the members of the Lodge). In this period, it was really difficult to access subcultural finds, like old movies and magazines, etc. All of the information was shared in person and through informal networks,” Fornwald explains.

“Maybe that is where that collective collaborative impulse came from, pre-social media via the internet. Cities like Winnipeg in isolated regions had regional specificity and these artists were part of what later was termed Prairie Gothic. I come from Regina and similar things were happening. You’d present in Toronto or Vancouver and they’d say ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before.’”

This exhibition came about as a result of an assignment in the Introduction to Curatorial Studies Course assigned by Botar.

“I combined the proposals put forward by eight groups of students in my course,” he says.

The School of Art has made a huge contribution to artistic life in Winnipeg since 1913, Fornwald adds.

“This (exhibition) is an example of the School of Art producing artists who went on to international recognition,” she says.

A reception hosted by the students today at 3 p.m. will be followed by an “exquisite corpse-athon” with former Royal Art Lodgers Dumontier and Farber, and Thorneycroft. The public is invited to participate in this collective creative activity.

The results will be exhibited in the gallery.

fparts@freepress.mb.ca