David Hoffos
Scenes From The House Dream

The TrépanierBaer Gallery is pleased to announce an exciting new exhibition by critically acclaimed 2002 Sobey Art Award winner (2nd prize) David Hoffos. Hoffos has been gaining considerable international recognition with his transformative installation projects,most recently exhibiting at the Tapies Foundation in Barcelona, Spain. With this exhibition Hoffos further engages his limitless baroque delight in the visual spectacle of illusionism. Viewers to the gallery will be drawn into a fantastic realm of cinematic projection wherein the mechanics of illusionistic deception and the illusion itself dually interplay to immerse the viewer in a perpetually shifting center. Like an early magic theater maker Hoffos is as much drawn to the apparatus of cinematic construction as he is to providing transit into the fantastic realms he conjures. Indeed, the very title of the exhibition, “Scenes from The House Dream” draws us into Hoffos’s neobaroque storytelling strategies. This fascination with the inner workings of illusion, further delights through intricately crafted constructions which reference the model making of museum display, and world’s fair pavilions – miniature worlds that the artist creates, illuminates, and transforms through a repertoire of illusionistic devices and dynamic compositional arrangements.
“Knowing how the trick is done doesn’t spoil the effect or suspension of disbelief. You go there willingly to be amazed and the only way you can be amazed is to participate in the illusion”, says Hoffos.
David Hoffos was born in Montréal in 1966 and lives and works in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. He received his B.F.A. with Great Distinction from the University of Lethbridge in1994. The artist has maintained an active exhibiting career since 1991. His film, video and installation works have been included in solo and group exhibitions in Canada, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States, including 2003 solo exhibitions at Trépanier Baer, Calgary; “Another City”, Montreal Museum of Fines Arts; “Present Tense” at the AGO,Toronto; Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Art Gallery, Corner Brook; and 2003 group exhibitions, “Individuals”, Antoni Tapies Foundation, Barcelona and “Oscilaciones”, Can Felipa, Barcelona. An installation by Hoffos was included in Singular Electrics, curated by Jorge Luis Marzo, at the Joan Miro Foundation in Barcelona while his video work was recently included in The Magnetic North:Canadian Experimental Video at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis and the 48th Oberhausen Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany.
He is the recipient of Canada Council Project Grants, an Alberta Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Banff Centre Studio Residency Award.