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Her_Dodalism_Toronto_Ontario_Canada_2007Her_Dodalism_Toronto_Ontario_Canada_2007
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She dreaming_Dodalism_Toronto_Ontario_Canada_TTC_2007She dreaming_Dodalism_Toronto_Ontario_Canada_TTC_2007
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Pusher Man_Dodalism_Toronto_Ontario_Canada_2007Pusher Man_Dodalism_Toronto_Ontario_Canada_2007
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The stewart_Dodalism_Venice_Italy_2007The stewart_Dodalism_Venice_Italy_2007
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god_Dodalism_Venice_Italy_2007god_Dodalism_Venice_Italy_2007
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The tourist_Dodalism_Venice_Italy_2007The tourist_Dodalism_Venice_Italy_2007
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Venice Hustle_Dodalism_Venice_Italy_2007Venice Hustle_Dodalism_Venice_Italy_2007
Artist Statement
During the 2007 Venice Biannually while street vending with “Cut-outs”, a series of mixed-media works made for the trip, I was sharing the pavement with a group of vendors who were selling bootleg products such as Gucci bags. One particular late afternoon, a vendor tired from the day’s hustle settled on a bench not far away from my vending spot. Mean while his companions, a group which varied between five to twenty men roaming from spot to spot on a turn of a dime, were discussing something. Sitting on the Venetian pavement in front of my vending setup I pulled out my sketchbook and began to draw his portrait thinking about modern nomadic peoples following not herd movements but opportunity.
The Dodalism process of engaged awareness and stream of consciousness expression was applied to the drawing. Setting out to limit the composition to only a few elements, my chaotic scribbles which usually spread from edge to edge of a page were confined within the portrait and few symbolic elements. As the drawing progressed, my internal thoughts were summed up in a Haiku like poem. Finished the Dodalism drawing remained focused, distilling the loop between the artists’ thought process and perception of the environment into a visual statement. The following drawings in the series experiment with a similar approach, focusing the Dodalism drawing on a specific idea with the intent on representation. The exception is the “god” drawing which was produced during a night long conversation with the women I was staying with in Venice. During that time a lot of things were going through my mind which never got distilled into a Haiku like poem.
“Faces” refines Dodalism by setting out a boundary concentrating the expression within a given context which in this case gravitates towards ideas around people and their place within the economy. The drawings centre on real people I would come across in my time in Venice and back in Toronto.
