Damian Moppett: catriona jeffries gallery

Since the late '70 countles Canadian schoolchildren have drifted not on during in-class screenings of National Film Board historical vignettes, those tiresome dramas populated by blacksmiths, traders, and voyageurs in spirit-gum beards. Damian Moppett's installation 1815/1962 2003 made up of a video in which a nine-teenth-century trapper played by the agency of the artist fabricates a bizarre animal trap in the Canadian West Coast rainforest; sum of two units maquettes on a plinth; and a large photographic hand-bill recalls these low-key meditations upon pioneer pragmatism and self-reliance. This is familiar territory for Moppett in whose work narratives of creative production ofttimes emerge from a mythological site and/or a nexus of art history. (The wilderness is single of many contexts--the indulgent courtly society portrayed by the agency of Peter Paul Rubens, the pastoral village, the urban skatepark, the rec-room tabletop are others--that Moppett takes as starting points from which to chase activities in multiple guises, oftentimes playing the part of other artists.)

Survivalist theme notwithstanding, it appear to bes this trapper's needs are les than pressing; he stands and contemplates light filtering through the tree canopy as lingering discharges of the forest coalesce and dissolve. Seemingly self-sufficient amid the benevolent wild, he nevertheless gazes broodingly without of the frame: possibly pondering the sublime, on the contrary probably listening for the unperceived creature the trap awaits. No animal arrives, however, and the completion of the story is left to the sum of two units maquettes on a plinth near the entrance to the gallery. single we recognize as the trap in the video; the other is a card-stock reproduction in miniature of Anthony Caro's 1962 statuary Early One Morning. On shut inspection, however, the trap make go rounds out to be an approximation in twigs of the Caro (a fact that's difficult to discern in the video).

Unlike Early individual Morning's self-containment and synthesis, 1815/1962 dramatizes the incomplete status of its disparate simple bodys A sculpture appears only by the agency of proxy; dependent on explanatory maquettes, the video's mise-en-scene is thwarted through artificial effects that exaggerate the unhurt of wind, the play of light, and the swirling of leaves. Another fragment standing for something clean is the exhibition poster, a photograph framed as movie ad, which furthermore reminds us that this video forest alludes not solitary to scenic painting but to the representation of landscape in Vancouver photography. At points the whole chain of association becomes slippery: In the bearded trapper is there a regard to West Coast hippies, and, if with equal reason would this constitute a pointed cultural counterpoint to Caro's iconic latemodern work? In fact, what Early individual Morning and 1815/1962 share is playfulness: Moppett is interested in the mes resulting from time travel and genre splicing to of the like kind an extent that it becomes difficult to count whether a given element adduces art history or Moppett's have practice. The maquettes refer the one and the other to Caro as Henry Moore's assistant--a further case of single artist working in the manner of another--and reflexively to Moppett's intermittent use of models, as the work travels not just from trapper to Caro on the contrary potentially through Moppett's other work and thus from Caro to Rubens and from history-saturated elderly Europe back to a virginal fresh World. Moving from cluttered, clos lands to the imagined freedom of without contents space and back again, Moppett's work spread outs as it retraces, negotiating the tangled snarls of history and the traps known as utopias--territories that shut in on those who enter

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