Emerging from Winnipeg’s Royal Art Lodge in the late 1990s, Marcel Dzama’s quirky drawings of a cast of unlikely creatures, 1940s-style babes, cowboys, cigarette-smoking tree-men, bears and bunnies, have won him an international following. The ink drawings are stained with muted washes in grey and brown, the latter often derived from root beer, which lends these surfaces a faint, seductive scent and shimmer. His work does not illustrate any specific narrative, instead remaining ambiguous. Dzama strips his figures of all circumstances, essentially stripped clean of narrative potential; the drawings are fragmented and isolated on the page, resembling dream sequences and flashbacks. Figures are left bare and simple with traces of unspoken inhibitions falling away. His characters become the very embodiment of inner conflict.