Hello there folks. So, just to shake things up a bit, I’ve uploaded this exhibition review that I’ve done for my Art Writing class. Every once in a while, don’t be surprised if I do this again. Anyways, without further ado…

Scenes From the House Dream:
Continuity and Discontinuity in the Work of David Hoffos

The phantasmagorical installations of David Hoffos’ Scenes from the House Dream at MOCCA bring to life the tension between Hollywood’s seamless world of movie magic and the discontinuous montages of early Soviet cinema. Drawing on techniques from the eighteenth century as well as recent Hollywood special effects, Hoffos creates environments that are illusionistic, nearly immersive; however, the negated narratives of his work and the disclosure of the mechanisms of his illusions challenge the seamlessness of his worlds. This constant interplay between continuity and rupture is the driving force behind Scenes from the House Dream and much of Hoffos’ oeuvre.

David Hoffos, Scenes From the House Dream: Circle Street, 2003.

The simple, low-tech illusions that Hoffos creates in his works produce convincing, self-contained worlds like a Hollywood film. Circle Street, one of the dioramas in the exhibition, presents a quiet suburban nocturne, with fireworks peppering the night sky. The sleepy street is frequented by a lone pedestrian, then a skateboarder, then a cyclist. Identical houses extending down the street call to mind the balmy, pastel homes of Edward Scissorhands or the idyllic California suburbs of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, made silent and strange by the onset of night (Tousley, 72). Hoffos’ adept use of miniatures, along with mirrors and forced perspective, make this bird’s-eye view feel almost real, like an establishing shot in either of those films but rendered in three dimensions.

As the viewer puts their face up to the portals into these tiny worlds, the miniatures inside become an immersive experience. The scenes depicted and the means by which they are depicted converge, rendering the medium invisible (Grau, 148). Hoffos’ realistic (though uncanny) apparitions even burst beyond their frames in artworks like Mary-Anne, where a life-size phantasm sits on the floor of the gallery, blurring the line between Hoffos’ miniatures and the rest of the space. These immersive techniques mimic the continuity editing of Hollywood films, which similarly seeks to render the mechanisms of film-making invisible in order to put a film’s unfolding narrative at the fore.

David Hoffos, Scenes From the House Dream: Airport Hotel, 2004.

Simultaneously, Hoffos’ scenes confound the purpose of continuity editing because their narratives are almost uniformly bathetic or without closure. Airport Hotel is a paragon of this contradiction. The viewer looks in upon a hotel room above an airport at night. A sleepless, pacing woman haunts the space – smoking, making a drink, changing clothes, then changing back. The setting, an anonymous hotel room on the edge of town, evokes a film noir sensibility that is only furthered by the viewer’s role as a voyeur, apparently looking through the peephole of the room (Tousley, 73). As Laura Mulvey observes, the pleasure of film noir is often derived from such voyeuristic scenarios, however only through the male ascertainment of female guilt (Mulvey, 987). Hoffos gives the viewer no such pleasure, only the impression of an illicit activity to come. The seamlessness of Hollywood cinema relies partly on the seemliness of its female characters, that is, their ‘rightful’ placement within accepted societal norms as objects of male desire and repressed anxiety (Mulvey, 987). Therefore, to deny the male rectification of anxiety through the ascertainment of guilt is to break the cinematic illusion of the scene. Most of the other dioramas in Scenes from the House Dream break cinematic narrative conventions in their own right; Hoffos puts narrative into stasis in favour of other more discontinuous modes of cinema.

Like the confounded narratives of each individual scene, the narratives between scenes do not give rise to a logical unfolding of events. Instead, Hoffos juxtaposes each of his scenes with the rest in order to create further dialectical meanings, a process which filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein calls ‘montage’ (Eisenstein, 46) Like montage, Hoffos’ work sets aside the Hollywood conventions of continuity to pursue more abstract effects, inevitably calling attention to the means of cinematic construction. Themes of anxiety, wonder, loneliness, the pathetic and the bathetic emerge in each scene through its juxtaposition with other works in the show, but this juxtaposition can only happen at the price of immersion. Upon stepping back from one of Hoffos’ illusions and moving through the exhibition space to arrive at the next, the viewer is reminded of the television screens that facilitate the ghostly apparitions in his models; as the viewer passes by, the spectral figures sitting in the corners of the room, like the one in Mary-Anne, are revealed to be flat boards animated by simple projections.

Just as in a Sergei Eisenstein film, this rupture of continuity does not stop the viewer from partaking in Hoffos’ cinematic illusions. This is because as Susan Sontag observes, film is a medium “whose surface is so unified and clean, whose momentum is so rapid, whose address is so direct that the work can be… just what it is” (Sontag, 11). The filmic format is difficult to experience at a distance, and it is a forgiving medium because of this. Lapses in the quality of work or lapses in tone are not easily noticed because of the enveloping nature of cinematic experience. Philosopher Susanne Langer describes this immediacy as the ‘dream mode’ of film. To the viewer, film operates within an “endless now” that mutes the disjunctive qualities of any given film – just as a dream mutes its strangeness until the dreamer awakens:

“Places shift, persons act and speak, or change or fade – facts emerge, situations grow, objects come into view with strange importance, ordinary things infinitely valuable or horrible, and they may be superseded by others that are related to them essentially by feeling, not by natural proximity […] but the immediacy of everything in a dream is the same for [the dreamer]” (Langer, 80).

David Hoffos harnesses film’s forgiving dream mode in his work, allowing the viewer to feel continuity and rupture simultaneously. His work is an irreducible experience that is truly ‘against interpretation,’ though I have attempted to interpret it here. Like a dream or the best films, one can only think about Scenes from the House Dream once one has returned to the waking world, and by then, it is too late.

Works Cited:

Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: essays in film theory. Ed. Jay Leda. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949.

Grau, Oliver. “Remember the Phantasmagoria! Illusion Politics of the Eighteenth Century and its Multimedial Afterlife.” Media Art Histories. Ed. Oliver Grau. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Leonardo Books, 2007. 137-159.

Hoffos, David. Scenes From the House Dream: Airport Hotel. 2004. Artist’s collection.

Hoffos, David. Scenes From the House Dream: Circle Street. 2003. Artist’s collection.

Langer, Susanne. “A Note on the Film.” Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005. 79-81.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Art in Theory 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. 982-989.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. 3-14.

Tousley, Nancy. “Dream Scenes.” Canadian Art Spring (2009): 72-80.