Comic book series : Constructive Abandonment

FROM TWO OF THE FOUNDING MEMBERS OF THE INFLUENTIAL COLLECTIVE, THE ROYAL ART LODGE

June 2011

Constructive Abandonment is a series of small paintings featuring surreal vignettes with animals and children weighed down by the pressures of life. With absurdly comedic interactions, the text varies from straightforward to even more abstract and nonsensical than the images that it accompanies. The paintings end up reading like absurd fine art gag strips, with certain paintings obviously referencing child's play or literature and others seemingly without reference, completely untethered.

Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber are founding members of the Royal Art Lodge. Since the dissolution of the influential Winnipeg art collective, Dumontier and Farber continue to work and create art together. Constructive Abandonment is not only a partnership of two of today's great contemporary artists, but also of cohesive dissonance. Pages that could be forgettable one-liners become investigations into intellect and our ability to draw correlations between contradictory elements in a single image, as well as being laugh-out-loud funny.