Dan Starling Charlie & the Chocolate Factory

Dan Starling’s solo exhibition takes Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the popular children’s book written by Roald Dahl in 1964 as it’s starting point. Dahl was criticized for his racist characterization of the workers in the chocolate factory of the book as “pygmies from Africa.” In the subsequent edition, he chose to refer to them instead as the “Oompa-loompas from Oompaloompaland.” Starling chose to redraw all the original illustrations from the second edition using drypoint and then produce a series of subsequent alterations to the images that call attention to this history as a kind of “return of the repressed.” Working in drypoint and etching, a new medium for Starling, the installation includes four new books showing this evolution as it progresses, and fifty-five original copper-plate prints.

Curated by Justin Muir, Executive Director, Malaspina Printmakers

Dan Starling is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses video, sculpture, performance, installation, photography, painting as well as artist books and art writing. Starling’s work takes different aesthetic traditions and rubs them together to bring forth the contradictions inherent in each. He studied art history at UBC and visual art at Emily Carr and has experience exhibiting locally, nationally and recently in an international art context in both solo and group exhibitions. In the spring of 2011, Starling returned to Vancouver after completing a Meisterschuler at the Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt Germany. He is currently a sessional faculty member at Emily Carr University.