dc3 Art Projects is pleased to present Storyland, Tammy Salzl’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, featuring multimedia installation and collaged painting. Rooted in the practice of storytelling, Salzl’s work uses familiar tropes of children’s stories and fairytales to tell contemporary fables that examine the emotional and psychological complexities of modern life.

Salzl’s tell-tales series of small collaged paintings mine traditional stories, contemporary scenarios and scavenged images to construct scenes of children and animals that unsettle assumptions of innocence. The figures depicted – humans, animals and hybrids – challenge normalities and embody an ‘otherness,’ as their actions reveal fears and desires of the inner self.

Transforming these moral tales into immersive installations, Salzl’s large-scale mixed media works, The Cleansing and Making Ready, implicate the viewer in the actions that transpire. Using found and created video, sound environments and hand-worked paper constructions, Salzl invites the viewer to explore peaceful domestic settings in which all is not as it initially seems, as tranquility gradually gives way to curiosity and unease.

In Storyland, Salzl confronts human nature, morality, and the struggles intrinsic to human existence. With no clear beginning, middle and end, the complexities that these stories present, like their fairytale predecessors, encourage the viewer to work through contemporary anxieties and make sense of the changes in the world around us.

Tammy Salzl is an Edmonton-born, Montreal-based painter who received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University in 2014. Her work has been widely exhibited in solo and group shows across Canada, as well as in Germany, Mexico and the US. Salzl’s large-scale mixed media installation The Cleansing debuted at Circa POPOP in Montréal in 2015, and was invited to be presented as a Feature Project for Art Toronto 2015. Unfamiliar Selves, a collaborative exhibition with Jude Griebel, recently debuted at Touchstones Nelson Museum of Art and History in Nelson, BC and will travel to the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie in 2017.

Photography by Blaine Campbell