Marcel Dzama is sitting in a rather staid meeting space of the Timothy Taylor Gallery. On the glass table at his knees rests a very large paper cup filled with coffee and many torn sachets of sugar. He looks a bit like a child sent to a corner to reflect on his behaviour. He looks as if he'd rather be elsewhere, but he can make do of the situation by amusing himself with whatever his surroundings might hold. Not such a surprising attitude for an artist who turned to small format drawings and collages when he found himself stranded in a hotel room after his house burned down. What's more, in spite of a growing international success, he long resisted moving to New York from Winnipeg, Canada.

This interview was conducted in person at Timothy Taylor Gallery on 07/03/07.

Martine Rouleau: You previously refused to move to New York, where many galleries sell you work, stating that it was too hectic. You've now lived there for three years. How has it affected your work?

Marcel Dzama: There's a kind of strange energy there that lets you do more than you thought you could ever do. You see so many people doing so many great things that I think you don't limit yourself as much. When I was in Winnipeg I would think: "Maybe I should try that, but I don't know if I can do it." Everyone is so gung-ho in New York that you just go ahead and do it. It's a lot easier to do things there for some reason just because everybody's so active that you can pick up on that energy and channel it for your own work.

MR: You started doing small scale drawings because you were confined to small spaces. Now that you have a lot more space at your disposition, has this affected the scale of your work?

MD: Yes, I go quite large now sometimes with drawings because I developed this new way to work by connecting drawings together so I just kind of keep connecting them upwards and sideways so it turns into this big connected mess of drawings.

MR: Would you allow the galleries to sell them piece by piece so that all the collectors have to meet and agree to lend their part of it in order to show it?

MD: [laughs] No, they have to sell the whole thing.

MR: In 1996, you helped found the Royal Art Lodge, an artist collective that assembled friends and family members in a shared studio. The artist collective met weekly to create puppets, videos, dolls, musical performances, costumes and drawings. What happened to the Royal Art Lodge?

MD: It still exists. It's in a small form now that there's only three of us. It's Neil Farber, Michael Dumontier and me. We still collaborate but it's mostly through the mail. We've gone global. It's changed the dynamic a little bit. It's not as much fun as it was because I have to do drawings by myself and mail them. It's nice to see what they do with them though. We've kind of evolved in separate ways in our solo careers which is healthy and we can still go back to where we used to be when have meetings of the Lodge. We meet every time I go back to Winnipeg and we usually play music together. I play the guitar and Neil plays guitar and Michael plays drums.

MR: Would you ever start another artist collective?

MD: I don't know. It just happened organically. We just happened to have a similar aesthetic and taste and we just meshed together really well. We had a lot of free time and space was very inexpensive to rent in Winnipeg. I think it's harder to do now that I'm in New York because everybody is so busy.

MR: Your work has a very consistent aesthetic that allies folkloric and cinematic references to the menagerie of childhood stories. The result is an assemblage of disquieting characters all wrapped up in the same surreal narrative. The constancy of this imagery is in sharp contrast with your changeable choice of medium. This exhibition contains collages and drawings, but also a film (Lotus Eaters), paintings, photographs, installations and life-sized sculptures. In 2003, you collaborated with They Might Be Giants on a collection of stories and songs called Bed, Bed, Bed. In other words, you're a bit of a renaissance man. How would you qualify your aesthetic?

MD: I don't know what it's based on. It's just little things that catch my attention. I store them in my head and they become part of my world. It's an accumulation of little things that interest me for some reason, I don't know why. It might be something as mundane as a label on something and I just really like it.

MR: Your drawings and collages have a very specific aesthetic: they're flat and show very little texture whereas your sculptures are highly textured, fuzzy and tactile. Do you have a very different approach for two-dimensional works and three-dimensional ones?

MD: Yes, I find it freeing. It's more of a messy process whereas drawing is very neat and with collage I have to be careful about cutting everything out perfectly. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist when it comes to drawings and collages. I'm kind of looser in paintings. But with sculpture for some reason I feel that anything goes. There's more freedom, I feel that I can get away with more.

MR: Do you accumulate things?

MD: Yes, constantly. I keep a scrapbook and every time I see something I like I'll take it or write a reference to it. I also draw in it and do little storyboards for films.

MR: You moved from drawings and paintings to film. Does your choice of medium change because it has to adapt to whichever project you wish to do or because you want to experiment with a certain medium and think of a project that will let you do that?

MD: I'm usually intrigued by something about the medium or sometimes I'll just get really bored of doing drawings and I'll want to do paintings and then I'll get bored of painting and I'll want to look into doing films or sculptures. It's about just keeping it exciting.

MR: Although you've established your reputation early in your career on the basis of meticulous small-scaled drawings and collages, your work seems to be turning more and more to film. You had a retrospective at Ikon [in Birmingham] not so long that gave an overview of your still very young career. What does this show mean to you?

MD: This time, the show is more articulated around the film (Lotus Eaters). All the drawings had to do with the characters in the film, all the paintings had to do with filmmaking. There's a mention of the film in every piece of the show.

MR: You've been doing film for a while?

MD: Yes, film has always been an influence in my work. I've been influenced in the creation of narratives and characters and things like that. I also did short films before I did Lotus Eaters.

MR: Are you going to play the score of the film yourself?

MD: No, there's going to be a piano player at the opening who will play the theme. After that, the pianola will automatically play the theme. I tried to appropriate the theme from the movie The Third Man but I changed it a bit. It will be an homage created by poking holes in the partition of the pianola. The holes make drawings on the scroll as well as the theme.

MR: Do you have projects in the works?

MD: I would actually like to do a more narratively based film. I don't know exactly what yet but my wife is actually working on a screenplay at the moment so maybe collaborating with her at some point would be very fun to do. We've collaborated on paintings and drawings and things like that and we did short videos before that were shown in Winnipeg a long time ago, in the late '90s.

MR: You seem to be an artist because you enjoy it and not because you wish to gain a certain status. A good illustration is your discreet approach to success and was perfectly illustrated in the fact that, even after having sold works to the likes of Jim Carrey and Nicholas Cage, you were still interviewing for a job at Wal-Mart (the American department store). You were rejected... thankfully. Have you stopped interviewing for jobs at Wal-Mart yet and started to believe that you can make a living as an artist?

MD: [laughs] Yes. I think I could get a better job now if I ever decided not to be an artist anymore. Maybe I could go into film but that's still art. Maybe I could be a musician... but that's still art. I don't know what else I could do.

Martine Rouleau is Tate Scholar at the London Consortium where she is currently completing a PhD. As a freelance curator and cultural programmer she has contributed to various projects at the ICA, the Haunch of Venison, Tate and the Whitechapel Gallery. She also lectures at Westminster Adult Education Service and at Birkbeck College.

Image © Marcel Dzama, courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London