I-20 is pleased to open the first New York show for Deco Dawson and Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge. This will include a viewing of Dawson’s 16mm. film on DVD, The Arm Wrestling Bear Movie, 2001. The silent film - portraying the rise and fall of a blindly ambitious, ill-tempered arm wrestling bear - is one of five "classics" by the artist, all stylized silent shorts. Dawson has left clues to the film’s origin in the actors’ modern dress, and the bear’s contemporary mannerisms.

Deco Dawson was born in 1977 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where he lives and works. His most recent short film, FILM (dzama), based on a surreal fictional biography of the artist Marcel Dzama, was awarded first prize at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival. Dawson is currently co-directing his first feature film, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary.

The Royal Art Lodge was formed by six Winnipeg artists in 1996 for experimental collaboration. The members—Michael Dumontier, Marcel Dzama, Hollie Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langois and Myles Langois—work together in producing a variety of works on paper, which could be described as upbeat, tragic and ambivalent. These artists also collaborate with Deco Dawson on films, videos and other projects. Approximately 50 drawings by the group will be exhibited in the I-20 show. The Royal Art Lodge was co-founded by Marcel Dzama, who graduated from the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. Dzama has had solo exhibitions at Artcore, Toronto; the David Zwirner Gallery, New York; Espacio Minimo, Madrid; the Richard Heller Gallery, Los Angeles; and ARTPACE, San Antonio, Texas.

All of the photographs by Spencer Tunick in the front gallery were shot between 1985 and 1995. They were taken with a half-frame camera when Tunick was working in resorts in upstate New York. The images were placed in hundreds of key chain viewers. For Tunick, the key chain viewers are meant to be a portable memory. By taking the image out of the key chain viewer, Tunick has tried to highlight some of the personalities. Tunick thinks of these images that came from miniature backlit worlds as conversations within a conversation piece. In 2002 Tunick will participate in the 25th São Paulo Bienale, will have a solo show at the Hales Gallery, London, and will organize a performance for Art in General’s 20th Anniversary.

The work by New York artist Andrea Claire is a site-specific wall drawing of the word PEA installed in the rest room in green tape. Architectural drawings typically consist of text and lines working together to represent space. Claire, who is also an architect, has tried to collapse this form of representation with the physical perception of space. The word now represents the space in a perceptual way that would also, ideally, transcend the text. Claire has shown in I-20's 2000 Dusk exhibition, and will have work in a group show at Bellwether in Brooklyn, also opening on January 4.