Part of Winter 2007
Pleasure Dome is pleased to present a screening of work by Barry Doupé, including the Toronto premiere of the emerging Vancouver-based artist’s At the Heart of a Sparrow. Doupé’s classic cel-based and computer-aided episodic animations feature distorted figures and landscapes that appear precisely incomplete, muted, and at times concisely over-determined. His cast of characters and the spaces they inhabit seem like flayed and shifting skins layered uneasily upon their internal structures. Unnerving audio tracks echo the movements of these outer textures, sliding about and flourishing from the terrifying hollow that exists beyond them. Reminiscent of the painted domestic tableaux’s of Eric Fischl and David Hockney, Doupé’s videos likewise render familiar phenomenon ambiguous – his source material is the uncanny. With seemingly rudimentary animation techniques indicative of early video-game design, Doupé at once meticulously refines and works to obfuscate detail, as if what he has shown is only a disturbing stage in process, a process that is familiarly left unseen or disavowed. His animations, which also include A Boy on a Dock Blowing His Nose and Distraught Mother Reunites With Her Children, are marked with this anxiety, the ambivalence that persists at the knife-edge of symbolization and the unspeakable beyond it.
