Push-me pull-you art: Focal planes in a series of works by brainy new force Damian Moppett make the eye woozy Final Edition

• Published in: The Vancouver sun (1986)
• Main Author: Michael Scott, Sun Art Critic
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Vancouver, B.C Postmedia Network Inc 12.02.2000
• ISSN: 0832-1299

[Damian Moppett], a brainy new force in the ranks of Vancouver's conceptual artists, raises the possibility that such unguarded behaviour might in fact be the very face of creativity. In Impure Systems, his series of photographic works now on display at the Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Moppett presents monumental photographs of an old Formica-topped kitchen table in the aftermath of an intense session of makeup, gossip, photography and takeout food. Out of this Serengeti of empty film canisters, cold French fries, cigarette butts, empty highball glasses, Q-tips and errant lipsticks, Moppett photographs the doodling constructions of a pair of idle but determined hands: little Towers of Babel composed of bobby pins and makeup sponges, crumpled paper, candle wax, toilet paper and all the rest of the raw material that appears so lushly at hand. Moppett is 31, a Calgarian born into a family of artists. He trained at Emily Carr Institute and then took a graduate degree at Montreal's Concordia University. He has been thinking about the nature of artifice for some time. A recent suite of work, for instance, includes a quartet of painstaking, hand-drawn copies of images by French Enlightenment painter Francois Boucher, interposed with Moppett's own faux-adolescent, pop-eyed portraits of a tribe of alien mud-pie monsters. By juxtaposing the two -- one a faithful, obsessive copy of images that many would consider refined and conventional, the other a warty flight of fancy -- Moppett is asking us to consider the edges of what constitutes art. Are his own crazy, Mad magazine creations somehow more artful than his careful copies of Boucher's frilly allegories on the four seasons? The question is confounding because our middle-class intentions might otherwise lead us to overlook the mud-monster images as mere adolescent doodles.