NEW YORK.- The Drawing Center presents "The Royal Art Lodge: Ask the Dust," on view through March 8, 2003. Over a period of six years, The Royal Art Lodge members Michael Dumontier, Hollie Dzama, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Drue Langlois, and Myles Langlois, along with former members Jonathan Pylypchuk and Adrian Williams, have together produced a remarkably large body of work including drawings, sculptures, videos, puppets, music, costumes and dolls. Their low-tech aesthetic and crude-yet-precise draftsmanship, combined with a perversely idiosyncratic sense of humor, have resulted in an outpouring of unforgettable hybrid creatures, absurd commentaries on the human condition, and an art of dynamic energy, whimsical charm, and expressive beauty.

Inspired by the perils and paradoxes of real life and popular culture-film noir, television, science fiction, horror movies, and comic books-the drawings of The Royal Art Lodge constitute the core of their modus operandi. Since 1996, their weekly drawing sessions have informed and inspired each artist’s individual endeavors as well as spawned an interest in producing works in other media. During this exhibition, The Drawing Center’s main gallery will present collaborative and individual works on paper as well as new and sometimes three-dimensional manifestations of the creatures and characters originating in the drawings. In The Drawing Center’s Drawing Room, The Royal Art Lodge will present a new site-specific work especially created for this exhibition.