Some 40 small, sad-looking creatures chug miniature Budweisers, smoke tiny cigarettes and relieve themselves in public. Half are clustered in small groups, loitering and conniving along the shady corners of this decrepit shantytown they call home. A sense of impending doom lingers over the town, reflected in the faces of the population, with their perma-frowns and shifty looks. Welcome to artist Jon Pylypchuk’s twisted, foreboding universe, where the inhabitants are at once oddly endearing and strangely unsettling.

Press a weight through life, and I will watch this crush you is the melancholic title of Pylypchuk’s exhibition, which occupies half of the main gallery space at the Art Gallery of Calgary and is curated by Marianne Elder. Originally created for Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art inaugural group exhibition in 2006, Pylypchuk’s town is constructed from recycled wooden scraps salvaged from an old Packard plant and tire factory in Detroit. The citizens, some resembling turtles, others walruses or elephants, are created from patches of faux fur, recycled clothes, scraps of fabric and wood. Bits of coloured wood and fabric stand out from the greying town as vestiges of a brighter past.

Also included in the exhibition are two paintings by Pylypchuk, both of which echo the bleakness of the installation, with their pathetic characters and apocalyptic environments. One recurring element found in all of his paintings and drawings is the use of text to create darkly humorous storylines and to give his figures twisted dialogues. For example, in I sent a snake and a cross-eyed guy to destroy you (2008), one grey-felted creature says to another grey-felted creature floating in a lava-like body of water, “I sent a snake and a cross-eyed guy to destroy you and you jump into the fucking river.” The latter responds, without any use of punctuation to help decipher his reaction, “you brought a snake to destroy me.” The sock-made snake with arms says “yo,” and another onlooker states, “hey wait, now how the fuck is a cross-eyed guy going to destroy anything.”

Press a weight through life reminds me of artist Marcel Dzama’s drawings, which feature dark humour and similarly bizarre interactions between humanoid creatures. Dzama and Pylypchuk, it turns out, are both founding members of the Royal Art Lodge, an internationally celebrated Winnipeg art group.

During their formative years as artists, Pylypchuk, Dzama, Michael Dumontier and Adrian Williams collaborated on drawings and shamelessly swapped ideas. Pylypchuk says in a recent interview in Border Crossings that Williams and Dumontier were two of his biggest influences. “They were naturals, and I felt like I wasn’t. But what I got from them was that artistic ability, the way I understood it, doesn’t really matter. It was more about expression and how you approach it.”

Pylypchuk grew up in Winnipeg, studied at the University of Manitoba, then moved to Los Angeles, earning a master’s degree in fine arts at the University of California. He has had multiple solo exhibitions since 1999, from New York to Paris, and his work is owned by MOMA, the Whitney and The Saatchi Gallery, to name a few. It’s hard to imagine that this is the artist’s first solo exhibition in his home country, and the last time he had a group show in Canada was in 2003 at Toronto’s Power Plant.

Kudos to Elder and the AGC for finally bringing Pylypchuk’s work back to Canadian soil and allowing Calgarians to experience his twisted universe in its full melancholic glory.