Dzama’s drawings employ a fairy-tale sensibility to depict complex and often troublesome adult themes. Like isolated memories, the encounters between Dzama's haunting characters are typically situated in a sea of white space. If the drawings seem strangely familiar it could be that there is a relationship between one of the works on view and a photograph lurking in the shadows of your own memory.

"I do occasionally use photographs to draw and I keep a little idea book and flashlight by the side of my bed. I get the best ideas in that twilight land, just before I fall asleep.*"

In one of the dream-like drawings Dzama has transformed a historic photograph of Winston S. Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin from the Yalta Conference in 1945. Dzama has given Churchill porcine features and transformed Roosevelt into the Tin Man, ostensibly in need of a heart (Roosevelt was suffering from polio and died shortly after the photograph was taken).

The warm earthy browns found in most of Dzama's drawings are a result of the artist’s use of root beer base as a water color pigment. This gives the works the illusion of age and links them to one another, implying a sequence of fragmentary thoughts.

This sampling of Dzama’s work has been selected from two Northern California collections. The four color drawings on loan from Dare & Themis Michos are accompanied by selections from an edition of hand drawn litho prints by Trillium Press. The log cabin sculpture doubles as a container for the prints in the edition and The Dracula EP serves as a sound track for the collection.

*Marcel Dzama from an article in the Edmonton Journal, June 28th, 2002