A new exhibition of artworks showing the complex interior landscapes that fill the contours of mountain culture opened at The Kube gallery last week, as the Squamish-based artist’s solo debut. Bold acrylics by Dominik Kalita on custom-cut pine substrates are featured in This Must Be The Place, which launched with a reception at The Kube gallery in Gibsons on Feb. 7.
Kalita (a veteran of a recent high-energy competitive art battle at The Kube) is a professional graphic designer whose art practice extends the traditionally bold, clean lines of commercial imagery into subtly nuanced — and gently subversive — territory. His appetite for adventuring was instilled from childhood by parents who immigrated to Canada from the Czech Republic and raised him while skiing, mountain biking, and rock climbing. He was born in the resort town of Banff.
“We would spend every weekend, every moment, in outdoor spaces,” he recalled. “And when I think of mountain culture, it’s the people I do activities in the outdoors with, all very people-focused.”
Sweeping uplands and coniferous forests inhabit Kalita’s acrylics, formed into thematically consistent outlines (as in the branches of The Tree V2) and unlikely macrocosms. In Squamish Moth, the pastel colouring of the insect’s outstretched wings depicts alpenglow in a rock-ringed tarn.
The fusion of familiar creatures and fantastic pop-art elements stems from Kalita’s upbringing: his Czech-speaking parents decreed his childhood would be shaped by the same cultural influences as theirs of decades earlier in Eastern Europe. “Instead of regular cartoons or shows, I would watch 1970s-era talking ants and little lady bumblebees getting into trouble,” he said, “with all the characters voiced by one male.”
He learned to speak Czech before mastering English and remained enrolled in English-as-a-second-language classes until halfway through high school. When classmates offered to trade Pogs (florid cardboard discs popular in the 1990s), he was mystified. “I would just look at them blankly and ask, ‘What are you talking about?’”
The surrealist colour palettes of cartoons like Czech animator Zdenek Miler’s Krtek (The Little Mole) gradually worked their way into Kalita’s psyche. During backcountry treks, he assembles a mental catalogue of visual impressions and oblique offhand remarks. “And then I mash all those themes together,” he said, “and create a raven with a cabin on its back.” The winged raptor appears as Big Bird, its feathers outlined with a tawny halo and an A-frame trail hut at its heart.
Kalita is also a tattoo artist apprentice and a member of the Create Makerspace community workshop in Squamish. Workshop members help him shape his pine surfaces (an improvement over earlier struggles with a scroll saw in his garage); he sands them in preparation for painting, after which he sometimes adds a glass-like epoxy seal.
Raptors occupy a primal place in Kalita’s work (his crimson-tongued The Wolf embodies a view of pink snow-capped peaks). He’s fascinated by the pack psychology of such animals, and the process of transforming what might otherwise be terrifying into accessible images. The Bea confronts viewers with a look of earnest exasperation instead of ursine outrage. “I like to think I do it for little 10-year-old me,” Kalita added, “the little Dom who always wanted to be an artist, but never knew how to get there. I wish I could tell him it all works out in the end.”
Dominik Kalita’s This Must Be The Place remains on display at The Kube until Feb. 28.
