A visit with the Office of Surrealist Investigations

Don’t get hung up on “Dali melting clock weirdness.” There’s playful creativity at work here.

By MIKE YOUDS

Welcome to the Office of Surrealist Investigations.

You can leave your fedora on the coat stand at the door, but hold onto your imagination and creativity for this latest exhibition by Craig Willms, installed at Arnica Artist Run Gallery at the Old Courthouse until July 11.

Visitors have a sense of stepping into the fictional world of private eye Phillip Marlowe, the protagonist of detective novelist Raymond Chandler, though many other themes run through the evolving installation. The small gallery is sparsely furnished with vintage office furniture from the 1940s. Sometimes visitors encounter an “investigator” behind the desk, other times they are invited to do their own independent sleuthing.

This shadowy air of intrigue is a device to draw people into a collaborative art-making process. Anyone familiar with the art of Willms, who works as assistant curator at Kamloops Art Gallery when he’s not engaged in his own practice, will recognize parallel ideas. He did a similar free-flowing narrative art show in The Cube a few years ago.

Both shows are cut from the surrealist method of the Exquisite corpse, a collective creation in words or pictures of a group of collaborators. Willms draws inspiration from the dark detective fiction and film noir that emerged in the same period as the surrealist movement — between the world wars —as well as the contemporary medium of graphic novels.

Office of Surrealist Investigations is part of a continuing project documented on his blogspot, http://www.officeofsurrealistinvestigations.com.

“Part of the point of this is to get people to collaborate, to do some drawings and play some surrealist games,” said Willms, dressed to play the part. On holiday from his day job while holding the exhibition, he steps away from his usual curatorial role and casts himself instead in the role of artist as curator, welcoming others to join him.

Exquisite corpse tradition began as a writing game based on the writings of Andre Breton. It soon became a visual exercise, a parlour and children’s game, yet it was never intended for children, he explained. His aim is to “investigate” this thread of surrealism “as opposed to the Dali melting clock weirdness.”

“The idea of manipulating chance really runs through all the work. You don’t know what’s coming next.”

The timepiece reference alludes to the hallmark image of Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali. Dali’s work has come to symbolize surrealism in the popular imagination. Willms wants to explore the wider plain of surrealism, tying into the ideas of Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism, the art movement that spawned surrealism.

He encourages participants to set aside the image of the human corpse and take the idea further as metaphor and develop a narrative. Participants — they don’t have to be professional artists, though some of national repute have collaborated — are handed a panel (card stock) and invited to respond however they choose in any medium.

The panels are then mounted on one wall of the exhibition, as though the investigators are piecing together the clues in an unsolved mystery. Mounted on an adjoining wall is what appears to be an archival map of Kamloops. This is actually a fictional composite of archival maps with red thread connecting various images of chalk-lined murder scenes, also fictional, of course.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to nail the narrative. This isn’t a murder mystery, though there are shades of the unsolved Black Dahlia murder of 1947.

“A lot of surrealist ideas are very open-ended and not necessarily of an esthetic. People can take it where they want and see it as they want. I’m more interested in letting things loose, letting it go in different directions.”

The exhibition runs until July 11. Investigator on duty: June 30 and July 2-4, 7-11.