For more than three decades, David Hoffos has been known for immersive, multi-channel installations- dark walk-through environments and dreamlike nocturnal dioramas eerily brought to life through their signature low-tech illusionism. In a departure from their usual sculptural video dioramas, David Hoffos presents a series of hand-cut photographic constructions. These artworks explore the artist’s ongoing quest for new, lost, undiscovered, and unlikely analog techniques. 

ROADTRIPPING shifts the scene from nighttime narratives to daytime reveries, bringing a previously hidden current of Hoffos’s practice into full view for the first time.

They explain, “If my central creative impulses continue to draw from the worlds of cinema, scenography, psychology and illusion, there has always been a quieter but persistent call towards a lighter, mostly private, often unpresentable mode of expression where I indulge a more open-ended set of visual experiments.”

This new series of constructed objects (collages for lack of a better word) are manual and analog. They openly display their imperfections while emphasizing the truth of a photograph as a flat, tactile surface. Hoffos describes the production process as unpredictable, noting that “They vary wildly in their complexity, often dashed off in a moment or laboured over for days”.    

The unifying thread within this long-running body of work has always been the appropriation and alteration of images from a collection of 60s and 70s ephemera. In the case of this series, Kodachrome postcard scenes of travel and leisure reference an imaginary of family road trips, revisiting some of the hazy settings and moments of the artist’s adolescent inspirations.

Hoffos explains that “These sources are fed into a blender of revolving techniques and their endless variations. Mosaic, lenticular, kaleidoscopic, 3-d, anamorphic, magnifying, blurring, distorting and obscuring formulas and effects are recombined in search of undiscovered, lost, unlikely - and often absurd - ways of making (and unmaking) a picture.” What emerges is a kind of lucid daydream, where perception collides with nostalgia through the psychoactive lens of collective memory.

David Hoffos was born in Montréal and grew up in many cities in Ontario, Alberta, and Australia. Hoffos received their Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Lethbridge in 1994. Since 1992, Hoffos has maintained an active multi-disciplinary practice – with over 50 group shows, dozens of school and community collaborations, a few works for the stage, and over 40 solo exhibitions at public institutions in Canada, the U.S.A., Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal. In 2009, their sprawling 6-year installation series, Scenes from the House Dream, debuted at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge, before a cross-country tour that included the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Calgary and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto. In 2014, Hoffos completed permanent public sculpture projects in Grande Prairie and Lethbridge. Hoffos has led international residencies twice at the Banff Centre. They have received awards, including the Images Grand Prize in 2007, and the inaugural 2002 Sobey Art Award (2nd place).