David Hoffos
Another City
Neutral Ground, Regina, Saskatchewan (May 15 - June 18, 2004)

Lethbridge artist David Hoffo’s installation is a chamber of desires constructed by a child with a man’s means. It is sentimental, romantic and completely effective in its ability to charm and transport the viewer to Another City.

You enter Another City’s magical space as you would enter the balcony box of an old plush theater, through a black velvet curtain. Nearly a dozen video monitors and projections light the small room. The main feature, beyond a barricade of electronic equipment, is an arced screen bearing a blurry montage of kissing couples. There are more embracing pairs in the installation’s second component, a dazzling model of a city.

The cheap but ingenious video projection and curved screen set-up that Hoffos dubs “Cyclorama” is produced by duct-tapping big lenses to video monitors! Even though the effect is a bit dreamy, that it works at all boggles the mind and is worth the price of admission. The second part is an even more breathtaking display of basement workshop inventiveness. The city is mostly built from panel and girder high-rise kits popular in the 1960s. While there are many other details, the scene is surprising spare given the amazing illusion it offers. The clean, modular design is reminiscent of Moderne sci-fi visions of the future.

Other devices that contribute to the apparition include numerous tiny lights that illuminate the apartment interiors and streets, and the use of mirrors. The miniature resides in a large mirrored box, causing the city to appear to extend out in several directions. While you know that you are gazing through a sheet of glass and into a model, these effects enable you to willingly suspend your disbelief. This operation is aided by a final illusion. Four video monitors are set parallel to the window and behind the viewer. When you look into the model you see reflected on the glass—but you swear that the scenes are unfolding in the model—tiny couples walking, embracing on the street and on an apartment balcony, and a 50s style station wagon that flies through the air!

Another City is unashamedly romantic. There are not only the romancing couples but also an expressed, romantic nostalgia for the future as it was imagined in the pre-World War ll movies replayed (and remade) on the TV of Hoffos’ suburban childhood—a world of flying cars and clean, well-organized cities and people. His city is a hermetic utopia of simple pleasures and sated desire, and we are voyeurs pressing our noses against the shop window. But Hoffos does not quite leave us stranded; he wants us to participate and dream along with him. He always shows his work, his tricks, his homemade high/low tech. He lets us in on his secrets and techniques to encourage us to do something similar ourselves.

David Garneau 2004