In a Montreal gallery, artist David Altmejd has left his mark: A plaster cast of a hand is clawing its way through the plinth displaying examples of his surreal sculptures, as though yet another were emerging. In a world gone digital and virtual, the Canadian artist is emphatically engaged with physical media, whether it\u2019s plaster, clay, wood or resin. A list in the gallery includes more than 100 objects or materials he has used in his work.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do feel like there\u2019s something that happens when my hands touch the material,\u201d he said in an interview from his Los Angeles studio. \u201cIt\u2019s almost as if it triggers a spirit that\u2019s in the material and wakes it up. I realize as a sculptor that\u2019s what I do.\u201d<\/p>\n
What is awakened is fantastical. Altmejd is known for highly detailed sculptures that use hybridization, replication and inversions of interior and exterior to evoke some crossover among human, natural and alien worlds. They are both dreamlike and nightmarish, including elements of science fiction, pop culture, classical myth and biology. <\/p>\n
Altmejd\u2019s sculpture process is partly planned \u2013 using many tools, materials, and techniques \u2013 but also guided by instinct.<\/p>\n
His current show, at the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al, the institution he attended in the 1990s when he abandoned a degree in biology for fine art, focuses on his busts while including subsequent pencil drawings on similar themes and those sculptural interventions into the plinths that display the work. <\/p>\n
\u201cHis works reveal the artist\u2019s vision of how beings are born, constructed, transformed, dislocated and regenerated,\u201d wrote Louise D\u00e9ry, the curator of the UQAM show, who also organized Altmejd\u2019s show at the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2007, in an e-mail. \u201cThey plunge into the interior of the living being. They also reveal the breadth of a practice obsessed with the body and its flesh, the skull and its cavities, the eye and its connections, the hands and fingers that shape.\u201d<\/p>\n
Altmejd’s works reflect his vision of beings \u2018born, constructed, transformed, dislocated and regenerated,\u2019 writes curator Louise D\u00e9ry.<\/p>\n
The show she has curated is a gathering of highly unusual creatures: a man with a great domed head like a classic TV alien and long strings of hair; a rabbit with disconcertingly human eyes registering alarm; a head with the face replaced by a large hole from which crystals emerge. The exhibition includes many new works but also a werewolf\u2019s head dating to Altmejd\u2019s student days as he began to develop his monstrous iconography.<\/p>\n
The appeal of the werewolf \u2013 part animal, part human, all transformation \u2013 is rather obvious. Altmejd\u2019s other repeated character, the rabbit, is more obscure. As the artist explains it, the rabbit entered his iconography for a very practical reason: After he has finished a sculpture, he likes to draw on it, often in pencil, adding a final touch of the hand. There\u2019s not much room on a human face, but the rabbit\u2019s long ears offered a good drawing surface. Indeed, many of his rabbits have unnaturally long, upright ears. <\/p>\n
Once he had begun creating rabbits, he started to realize they were guides to the unconscious, like the one in Alice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland, who leads Alice down the rabbit hole into a dreamworld. His identification with the rabbit as a guide or protector goes back to his childhood, he figures. Speaking in a soft Quebec accent, he explains he is the son of a Polish-Jewish immigrant father and Qu\u00e9b\u00e9cois mother who would call him \u201cmon lapin\u201d as an endearment, while the kids at school mocked his prominent teeth. The rabbit also represents mischief \u2013 think Bugs Bunny \u2013 and is a master of diversionary tactics.<\/p>\n
Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n Works that add human features to animals’ heads are a through-line in his practice.<\/p>\n \u201cThe rabbit acts as a sort of trickster figure that can go underground, who\u2019s able to see in the dark and knows all the intricate channels of the underground by heart, can go in and out easily. I thought \u2013 I really love to delve deep into darkness \u2013 that\u2019s a perfect spirit to accompany my creation. <\/p>\n \u201cAlso, to escape being caught by a predator, it can jump in unpredictable ways. And that\u2019s what I do in my art. Every time something seems to be too controlled intellectually or too comfortable, there\u2019s an aspect of my personality that makes me make a jump in a completely opposite direction.\u201d<\/p>\n Altmejd\u2019s process as he creates his sculptures can include such leaps; it is both preplanned, relying on his mastery of dozens of specialized tools, moulding materials and decorative effects, but also driven by instinct. <\/p>\n Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n \u2018To escape being caught by a predator, it can jump in unpredictable ways. And that\u2019s what I do in my art.\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cDefinitely there has to be an aspect of the work that\u2019s controlled, that\u2019s very conscious, but that\u2019s the practical aspect, the technical aspect, how to build something. It has to be based on a knowledge of how the materials hold together,\u201d he said. \u201cBut there\u2019s another aspect that\u2019s very intuitive. I like the idea that I\u2019m letting the work itself decide what shape it\u2019s going to take. I try to listen to all the little voices \u2013 not literal voices.\u201d <\/p>\n If a mistake keeps occurring, if he tries to stick an eye in one place but it keeps falling off, for example, he understands this is not what the sculpture wants. <\/p>\n