By Peter Rahul
Instructor: Beth Stuart
David Hoffos has transformed a small room in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian art into a surreal journey through a miniature, perpetually dark world occupied with ghostly, dreamlike characters. The Canadian artist based in Lethbridge, Alberta, has been constructing and showing “Scenes from the House Dream” since 2003. The series consists of nineteen viewing windows isolated from one another in a dark room, through with the viewer is drawn into an imaginary world, each with it’s own minimal soundtrack. Within these hand made dreamscapes, small people are projected using various low-tech set-ups utilizing televisions and mirrors. The projections apparatus’ are visible to the audience, and stir up nostalgic memories of 18th century phantasmagoria shows. The viewer must become conscious of the illusion, which is aided by a peephole near the end of the show which allows the viewer a behind the scenes look at the “magic” that brings the scenes to life. This work is quintessentially postmodern, as “the cultural producer merely creates raw materials (fragments and elements), leaving it open to consumers to recombine those elements in any way they wish. The effect is to break (deconstruct) the power of the author to impose meanings or offer a continuous narrative” (Harvey, 51).
The viewer drifts in and out of disjointed narratives, in which nothing really happens; however the subtle loops make it as if the characters within the world are waiting for… something. The voyeuristic viewer is left in suspense, waiting for something terrible to happen. Hoffos’ scenes are always set at night, in solitary situations where “everything bad is merely imminent” (Enright, 24). The scenes are constructed with a sense of anxiety, as if the end of the world is just moments away. There is a sense of impending doom within all the works. In the piece Airstreams (2003), a woman residing in an airstream trailer parked in the woods nervously peers out her front door into the dark forest. What sounds like screams echo in the distance, yet the woman doesn’t see anything. She continues to step nervously in and out of her trailer as the sound as the video loops, yet she never finds the source of her unease. Hoffos has his roots in film, citing Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch as prime inspirations for the House Dream. The miniature sets draw similarities to films like Beetlejuice, Blue Velvet and The Shining, in which “innocence is thrown into a horrible world and there’s a feeling of trying to maintain that innocence when everything is trying to overwhelm and break it” (Enright, 27).
The viewer is compelled to create a narrative of their own, since Hoffos has made loose (if any) ties between characters and scenes. Hoffos himself has admitted that the narrative is not complete, he states “I’m keeping it pretty mysterious, even to myself. I don’t know the whole story. If I did, I don’t think I’d make the work. I’m telling this story to myself” (Hoffos, Tousley, 111) The work can be seen from a deconstructionist point of view, “recognizing that, the deconstructionist impulse is to look inside one text for another, dissolve one text into another, or build one text into another” (Harvey, 51). In this sense, the work mimics that of graphic novels with individual frames that connect to one another through a sequential ordering, in which the viewer relates one frame to the next through imagining the in-between.
In 65 Footers (2003), we peer onto a dock, in which a single boat bobs to and fro. On the dock, a woman paces back and forth, unaware of the menacing shadow fluttering deep within the murky moonlit water. Reminiscent of a horror film, the tension-riddled scene never reaches a conclusion; instead Hoffos utilizes subtle loops to make the scene feel as if it is everlasting. “The collapse of time horizons and the preoccupation with instantaneity have in part arisen through the contemporary emphasis in cultural production on events, spectacles, happenings, and media images” (Harvey, 59). We are forced to peer through a fixed perspective into a scene in which the characters are like actors waiting for their queue. We expect the characters to recognize our presence, and put on a show, however the characters are oblivious to our god-like presence, and merely exist. The work in this sense is postmodern, as it “swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is” (Harvey, 44). The ephemeral feel of the mundane situations these characters are placed in, “emphasizes the deep chaos of modern life and its intractability before rational thought” (Harvey, 44).
The characters are not only limited to their miniature existence, in three pieces women are projected life sized, strategically placed at various points in the gallery. Mary-Anne (2005) sits against a wall, her foot wagging as though she were waiting for a friend to meet her. In Absinthe Bar (2004), a woman sits at a table running her finger around the rim of her glass, as if she were stood up for a date. These ghost-like figures fool the eye upon first glance, for within the dark gallery space they look like real people. Furthermore, “the reduction of experience to ‘a series of pure and unrelated presents’ further implies that the ‘experience of the present becomes powerfully, overwhelmingly vivid and “material”: the world comes before the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing the mysterious and oppressive charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy” (qtd in Harvey, 54). These figures are “glowing,” both figuratively and literally.
Hoffos’ dream world is accessible, yet still awe-inspiring. Much like slipping into a deep sleep, Scenes from the House Dream invites you into a world of fleeting moments, interlaced with anxiety, despair and loneliness. As nightmarish as this may sound, the work captivates you. Exiting the exhibit is much like being abruptly awakened from a great dream; you wish you could close your eyes and drift back into it.
Bibliography
Enright, Robert. “Overwhelmer: the Art of David Hoffos.” Border Crossings 99. (2006): 22-37.
Harvey, David. “Postmodernism.” The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford [England]: Basil Blackwell 1990. 38-65.
Tousley, Nancy. “Crossovers: David Hoffos.” Border Crossings 91. (2004): 110-111.
Tousley, Nancy. “David Hoffos: What happens next?” Canadian Art 19.3 (2002): 56-57.
Tousley, Nancy. “Dream Scenes” Canadian Art 16.1 (2009): 72-80.
Peter Rahul is a third-year Drawing and Painting major at OCAD U
