David Hoffos
Artist's Statement
"Through my installation work I have sought to reveal and examine the sources of illusion found within genre movies, stage magic, theme park attractions, 19 th century parlours, and museum displays. The evolution of my work has been a steady process of accumulating and inventing techniques and devices and then applying and refining them. Over the course of more than 20 installations my work has developed step-by-step from simple, stand-alone film/sculpture pieces into complex, immersive, multi-channel environments. A few of the techniques and devices that characterize my work include: film and video projection onto cut-outs, large miniature scenes, mirrored boxes, phantom figure illusions, ghost video glass effects, cineramas, homemade video projectors, and curtained entrances.
"You Will Remember When You Need to Know, the first of the works to incorporate a miniature scene, used genre cues – the abandoned house, the dark forest, searchlights – to situate the viewer within a 1950s sci-fi/horror UFO visitation scenario. As a way of choosing subject matter, I started working through the movie genres. My large works Catastrophe (disaster movie) and Another City (sci-fi/romance) employed genre cues and went further towards placing the viewer at the centre of both the skeletal narrative and the illusion apparatus. For example, in Another City the viewer stands at a window overlooking a vast miniature metropolis; their eyes adjust to a giant, dim cyclorama projection – the big movie-ending kiss fills the screen; life-sized lovers appear to materialize in the space as the mechanisms of deception (TVs, vcrs, glass, cut-outs) are finally revealed in the pulse of their own light.
"I have begun to move beyond genre towards more personal archetypes and subjects. In 2002 I embarked on a five-year/five-phased project which will result in a series of fifteen to twenty small installations down a long hallway, forming a sort of dream narrative called Scenes from The House Dream.Scenes from The House Dream – in various incarnations – has been exhibited at Trépanier Baer, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Can Felipa ( Barcelona) and the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery. Upcoming venues include Gallery TPW in Toronto, Toronto International Art Fair, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Eastern Edge, and the Mendel Art Gallery. Scenes from The House Dream, Phase Three will debut at Trépanier Baer in April 2005."
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