Publisher's Synopsis
Constructive Abandonment is a series of small paintings featuring surreal vignettes of animals and children weighed down with the pressures of life. With absurdly comedic interactions, the text varies from straightforward to even more abstract and nonsensical than the images that it accompanies. The paintings end up reading like absurd fine-art gag strips, with certain paintings obviously referencing child's play or literature and others seemingly without reference, completely untethered. Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber are founding members of the Royal Art Lodge. Since the dissolution of the influential Winnipeg art collective, they continue to work and create art together. Constructive Abandonment is a partnership not only of two of todayÆs great contemporary artists, but also of and expression of cohesive dissonance. Pages that could be forgettable one-liners become investigations into intellect and our ability to draw correlations between contradictory elements in a single image, as well as being laugh-out-loud funny.
