From winter springs an art collaboration

The art scene in the climatically inhospitable Canadian city of Winnipeg is having its day in the L.A. sunshine. Across town there are exhibitions and performances of Winnipeg artists that provide a context for MOCA’s presentation of “The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust,” an exhibition of collaborative drawings, paintings, videos, dolls, puppets, kites and music created by the Royal Art Lodge, a self-proclaimed “Self-Serving Secret Society” that is the brainchild of six undergraduates from the University of Manitoba art department working not so secretly in Winnipeg from 1996 to 2003. Together these shows provide a glimpse of a vibrant art scene and the unique aesthetic of this central Canadian city and its community of artists.

The Royal Art Lodge began as a joke, a way for a group of friends in their early 20s -- Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams -- to take a weekly break from their solo careers and the impending completion of their schooling. The group eventually expanded to include Dzama’s younger sister, Hollie, and Langlois’ brother, Myles. The premise was incredibly simple: They would get together one night a week and draw. “It was about friendship,” says Dumontier. “We liked each other’s work. I thought we’d keep the drawings without ever really showing anybody.”

But as the evenings progressed, the work became increasingly collective. “One person would work on a drawing until they didn’t know what to do anymore, and then they’d throw it into the center of the table. ‘Can you save this?’ ” recalls Langlois, of their oft-uttered lament. “Another member of the group would pick up the drawing and continue the work.”

At the end of the evening, they’d pack the drawings into a collection of old suitcases. Eventually the group members gave themselves a ridiculous official-sounding name that riffs on the artists and Winnipeg’s immigrant working-class roots and the do-goody collectivity of lodge culture. The secret of the society was not so much its clandestine activities as the group members’ inherent shyness and Winnipeg’s remoteness from the bluster of the big-city art world; they weren’t so much secret as completely unknown. They also invented the most generic crest they could think of -- a shield with a star.

Over the seven years represented by the show, the lodge produced hundreds of idiosyncratic, cryptically narrative, piquantly humorous drawings and collages that blend a playful homemade aesthetic with narrative influences that include instructional films, comic books, film noir, science fiction and the group’s repertoire of stock characters, including sad clouds, a large heart walking around on a pair of men’s trousers, deer people in bathrobes and a wolf that vomits blood. In the process, all of these aesthetics have combined to support what is perhaps their most potent creation, theRoyal Art Lodge itself.

Despite the group’s innate introversion the art lodge has struck it big. The exhibition at MOCA was co-curated by Wayne Baerwaldt, director of the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, and independent curator Joseph R. Wolin, and has been on a hugely successful two-year world tour. It began at the Drawing Center in New York in January 2003 and then traveled to the Power Plant De Vleeshal in Middelburg, Netherlands; and Wayne State University in Detroit before coming to MOCA. It has boosted the individual careers of all six of the founding members in a way that would be hard to imagine without the success of the group.

This success is evidenced by the shows and other events that have run concurrently with the MOCA exhibition. Drue Langlois and Dumontier’s band, Eyeball Hurt and the Medicine, played at the Royal Art Lodge opening at MOCA in November. Pylypchuk, who received a master’s in fine arts from UCLA in 2001, and Williams -- the first members of the group to leave Winnipeg and the lodge -- have a show of paintings and drawings at China Art Objects gallery in Chinatown through Jan. 8. And Richard Heller Gallery at Bergamot Station has hosted a show of collaborative drawings and paintings by the extended Dzama family, under the amusing -- and not entirely inaccurate -- moniker of the Royal Family. Marcel, who recently moved to New York, is the breakout star of the art lodge, and three members of the lodge are part of the Dzama family. Farber is Marcel and Hollie’s uncle, and the show also includes work by Marcel’s wife, Shelley Dick, and Marcel and Hollie’s parents, Maurice and Jeanette Dzama, who drew together on their first date as teenagers.

MOCA also has offered up events by three other Winnipeg artists who are not members of the lodge. Paul Butler threw an L.A. version of his traveling collage party -- an invitational gathering of more than 100 Canadian and Los Angeles artists who worked side-by-side creating collages from a supply of magazines, fabrics, buttons, spices, glue sticks and X-Acto blades supplied by Butler and MOCA. The event, held at MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary in collaboration with the Outpost for Contemporary Art in November, closed with a public presentation of the work created at the weeklong event. In collaboration with American Cinematheque, MOCA will present the low-budget dreamlike films of director Guy Madden from Jan. 21 through 27 at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. And on Feb. 3, Daniel Barrow will perform “The Face of Everything,” a “manual animation” that manipulates cartoon images on an overhead projector, accompanied by a live monologue. That event will take place at the SilverScreen Theater at Pacific Design Center.

But why does Winnipeg have this flourishing, internationally recognized art community when other similarly situated cities do not? Long hard winters with few distractions may be part of it, but Winnipeg also has a unique social history, including a massive general strike in 1919 that led the way toward the recognition of trade unionism and collective bargaining in Canada.

“It’s always been a left-leaning town, with an independent spirit and sense of camaraderie,” says Baerwaldt. “And the Arts Council of Manitoba is very generous.”

The council’s generosity has made possible grants to artists; the funding of an important public gallery for contemporary art, the Plug In-ICA; and a highly respected quarterly arts magazine, Border Crossings. “Having an arts magazine here has been extremely important,” says Meeka Walsh, the magazine’s editor. “The strategy of Border Crossings has been to mix local artists, which can piggy-back on the successful coattails of known artists. We’re well-known, and we get calls from galleries in New York all the time asking how to get in touch with the artists we cover.”

Baerwaldt also helped put Winnipeg on the international art map when, as director of the Plug In-ICA, he curated the Canadian Pavilion for the 2001 Venice Biennale, which took two major prizes for “The Paradise Institute,” a work by George Bures Miller and Janet Cardiff.

But just as important, Winnipeg also has a low cost of living and high degree of isolation and prairie inventiveness. With almost no commercial art market -- most successful Winnipeg artists work with galleries in other cities -- artists have a lot of latitude to develop creatively.

Pylypchuk, who arrived in L.A. in 1998, was startled by differences between the two communities. “In Winnipeg, there’s no scrutiny, so you can do whatever you want. It’s very liberating,” Pylypchuk says. “People who make paintings in L.A. have the ability to succeed here -- you have a lot of people looking at you who you’d want to have looking at you -- but sometimes careers become more important than what you make. It can be a hindrance. You want success, so you might forego what you would do naturally. In Winnipeg you don’t have that. Nobody expects you to succeed the way the Art Lodge has.”

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‘The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust’

Where: MOCA Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: Feb. 14

Price: Free

Contact: (213) 626-6222, www.moca.org