Marcel Dzama 

Now now, everything's gonna be alright?

, 2022

A limited edition print by Marcel Dzama is now available in celebration of the artist’s retrospective at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, where it traveled from Contemporary Calgary.

The print is from a group of works that expand on the tropical, oceanic, and celestial imagery and themes that Dzama has been exploring since 2020. Inspired by a range of sources, including John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost and the sixteenth-century Augsburg Wunderzeichenbuch (Book of Miracles), these works feature animals and figures in vibrantly colored natural settings with large, grinning moons, shimmering stars, and comets looming above.

For Dzama, these fantastical compositions of familiar yet far-off enchanted worlds respond in part to the universal experience of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a sense of wanderlust that many experienced while in lockdown. “I find the fear, anxiety, and sadness from the virus has changed my art,” Dzama notes. “It has focused it in a more hopeful and positive direction. I find when things are more easygoing, I get a little more cynical and world-weary, but when things are down, I find myself being more hopeful and positive in my work.”

Now now, everything's gonna be alright?, which relates to a 2021 drawing by the artist, features a stage-like curtain that is pulled back to reveal an ocean scene. The patterning on the curtain recalls textiles Dzama encountered during a 2018 trip to Morocco. A long, narrow canoe that extends from the left side of the composition is reminiscent of similar vessels depicted in the woodblock prints of the revered Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). The anthropomorphized moon directly recalls the moon in French filmmaker Georges Méliès’s seminal early film A Trip to the Moon (1902), while also alluding to the rare convergence of lunar events in 2020 and 2021, including a so-called super blood moon and a blue moon.