Offsite: Damian Moppett

Damian Moppett’s artistic practice uses a wide variety of media to question ideas of mastery, craftsmanship and value. Drawing on broad references from the history of modern art, Moppett uses the mediums of sculpture, painting, photography, drawing and video, often in relationship to each other, as a meditation on the activity of making art.
 
Images of the artist’s studio appear frequently in Moppett’s work, showing the studio as both a site of experimentation and a theatrical setting for the performative nature of art making. His studio images are visually dense, cluttered with objects, materials and artworks in process, in a working space often lit dramatically. Moppett then turns this documentation into finished paintings or drawings, making the representation of the process of creation the subject of his work.
 
Building on the sense of theatricality inherent in these works, Moppett’s project for Offsite represents the studio as a kind of stage set. Starting with the artwork Large Painting and Caryatid Maquette in Studio at Night, the artist transforms the painting into a three–dimensional space, taking shapes from the painting and reproducing them as large–scale cut–outs in metal. Powder-coated with bold colours, the shapes are propped up in the outdoor space as if from a pop–up book. Moppett’s project returns a reproduction of the artist’s studio into a sculptural artwork, one that viewers can experience at a larger–than–life size.

Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite is located on West Georgia Street between Thurlow and Bute Streets in downtown Vancouver.