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The first artwork you’ll see is the very picture of youthful abandon. It’s the kind of fun that hurts.
Hanging on the wall at Toronto’s YYZ Artists’ Outlet, the drawing shows a double-rider, thrown from his bicycle handlebars, crashing into the gravel road. Another depicts a lifeless body held Christ-like by a friend while somebody pours wine down his throat. Nearby, a tower of figures climb over one another like crabs in a bucket (its title informs us: they’re trying to be struck by lightning).
In the exhibition Cowboy Poet, Simon Fuh presents this curious suite of illustrations drawn from memory and fantasy. He thinks of the scenes as “social tableaux.” But in each depiction of adventure and misadventure the artist has painstakingly rendered in fine black ink, something is off.
What’s up with all the faces?
Through agony, ecstasy and absurdity, the figures wear the same blank look — like a crash test dummy or the neutral face emoji. If The Scream by Edvard Munch conveys existential terror, Fuh’s characters issue a deep, profound and spiritual “meh.”
“I think there’s something very 21st-century and post-internet about the completely blank face,” the artist says. “There’s an apathy to them. They’re like, ‘Just let the world happen to me; I don’t give a f–k.’”
Simon Fuh, Chance Dignity Guilt Wisdom Hate Humility, 2025. (Simon Fuh)
Fuh began the series last spring, after moving from Toronto back home to Regina. The artist — whose practice often explores youth culture, memory and how identity is formed — found himself in a creative rut, so he began reflecting, through drawing, on his own coming-of-age mythology indebted to the mid-sized Prairie capital.
For Fuh, “who you are as a person is an amalgamation of the stories you’ve lived” as well as the stories others tell about you. In Cowboy Poet, the artist shares some of his own dear tales from the dusty trail — including booze-ups, band practices and the time he got “bottled,” becoming a high school celebrity overnight.
Simon Fuh, Pop pop’s grandkid hit a deer, 2025. (Simon Fuh)
The illustrations are rich with narrative detail, says YYZ Artists’ Outlet director Ana Barajas. “The drawing Pop pop’s grandkid hit a deer could be its own short story or film, so much happens at once: a bar scene, a Rona parking lot, someone is under a truck, a deer has ended up on a windshield, a seagull circles a girl eating fries, a bottle is being thrown behind a dumpster. A day in the life in Regina.”
The blank face evolved as a way to represent the figures who populate memory. Rather than individuals, Fuh explains, the generic expression made his characters “ambiguous” and “anonymous.” “I wanted to draw the people you see on the subway or the people you see driving by. You don’t remember them specifically; you just remember the dumb thing they’re doing.”
Simon Fuh, Today I let go of anything that betrays my love of life, 2025. (Simon Fuh)
When he began using the device, it made the drawings look “stupid” and “funny,” he says. But he continued because “something stuck.” He calls the characters “dummies” — though he doesn’t use the term pejoratively. In fact, their automatic, uninhibited behaviours exhibit a kind of wisdom, at times. Fuh points out the image of a group joyriding down a country road for its beauty and simplicity. Their truck flies a flag that says, “Today I let go of anything that betrays my love of life.”
Elsewhere, the dummies seek pleasure and mischief. In many scenes, they evoke loneliness, ennui and boredom — even when they’re together. Often, they stare gap-jawed into their devices, despite a chaotic world around them. Their chronicles seem to represent a kind of horseshoe, Fuh says, where enlightenment and emptiness sit side-by-side.
Simon Fuh, All of us trying to get struck by lightning (after Nic Wilson), 2025. (Simon Fuh)
“The two dots with a line emoji: it becomes an impossible text to read,” the artist says. “You can never know what they’re thinking or feeling, which is the experience of living with other people in the world.”
Perhaps the dummies aren’t vacant, but detached, he suggests. Their minds are elsewhere. They are the kind of people so completely plugged in and profoundly checked out at the same time.
“I don’t want to put too much of a moralistic lens on it,” Fuh says. “It just feels like the texture of life right now.”
Simon Fuh: Cowboy Poet is on view through April 18 at YYZ Artists’ Outlet in Toronto.