From Tautological Observance

You can attribute Brandon Dalmer’s work to the Royal Art Lodge (RAL), Canada’s most successful artist collective since General Idea, the Regina Five and, long before them, the Group of Seven. Dalmer and the RAL are part of a growing art trend in drawing. RAL member Neil Farber (as well as other Canadian drawing hotshots like Jason McLean and Jeff Ladouceur) says that “in the last few years, drawing has gone from being a so-called secondary medium to a primary medium. While artists have always made drawings, it was usually as a preparatory sketch for an idea that was only fully realized in a painting, sculpture, installation or another medium. Now, it seems it is OK to be known as an artist who draws.” Which is great news — it’s still the best way to find out if an artist has manual skill or innate talent. Drawings are quiet, meditative and, in a small way, acts of resistance in a culture that often tends to favour the loudest and most techno-savvy.

Drawing is Dalmer’s main occupation. He doesn’t limit himself to works on paper, but draws on a variety of surfaces. His sketches have a delicate and very precise edge reminiscent of a graphic style from the ’50s and ’60s. His new series, Tautological Observance, also references the generic drawing styles of instructional illustrations and product packaging. It’s a stylish hybrid containing the hobby craft sensibility of Martha Stewart, Sol LeWitt’s instructional wall drawings and Ikea products. As Dalmer’s art practice mimics the strategies of hobbyists and DIY projects, his works offer helpful guidance, demonstrate hobby skills or display craft-related injuries. His images are selected for their absurdity, and for the era of the image.

Within the Epcor Centre’s +15 window space, Dalmer’s drawings are grouped and displayed as a Victorian salon-styled art gallery, and furnished with wood panelling, recalling the atrocious domestic environment of a 1970s living room. Frames touch frames, leaving no room for labels, recalling a common art display practice predating the emergence of the white cube gallery.

The jumble of framed work is a construed web of narratives that function in a style similar to stand-alone comic book panels. Seen as a whole, they tell stories of fictional histories, while maintaining a level of boredom and monotony that the artist finds so engaging. He has crafted all his main characters as generic images that are ironic, alluring and seductive presences on the page.

However, while Dalmer’s finely tuned drawings share some surface similarities with the RAL — a cartoonish style, with strange and murky narratives — his work is very much his own. While employing rather crude techniques such as tracing and paint-by-number, his work is still process-based. In a vain effort to find perfection, says Dalmer, he “spends most of his time in the studio tracing the same images over and over while watching Thundercats.”