Press release by Keith Wallace, August 2001

YOU THINK YOU'VE SEEN THE SIMPSONS? Branko Djuras mixes the Simpsons with Dostoevski. The celebrated cartoon TV show the Simpsons express the underbelly of the North American psyche - the anxieties of issues around the environment, gender, family, sexuality and violence. Using the Simpsons and Dostoevski's Crime & Punishment as source material, Djuras pushes these anxieties to a compelling extreme in an ambitious environmental installation of painting and sculpture. In Crime & Punishment, Homer Simpson pushes his desires to their uttermost limit and suffers the consequences.

Branko Djuras' work revolves around the themes of human behavior in the social, political and cultural times that we live in. The depths of our behavior, often manifested in depravity, are expressed daily in news reports that present us with a plethora of images which are difficult to assimilate, but the artist is one able to express these ideas in ways that can affect us more deeply. Djuras has done this with work that refers to power, crime, prostitution, addiction, and most profoundly, war. He approaches these themes in ways that are both humorous and serious and he plays upon the juxtaposition of the two to give his work greater impact. Past bodies of work have focused on muscle building culture and the incomprehensible meeting of utopian landscapes with the residue of the atrocities of war. Crime & Punishment bring these themes into the realm of popular culture and plays upon our collective imagination.

Branko Djuras was born in former Yugoslavia. He and his wife Mila immigrated to Canada in 1994. He exhibited widely in Serbia and Croatia before moving to Canada. Recent exhibitions have taken place at the Burnaby Art Gallery, Goethe Institute, Vancouver, and Lux Gallery, Vancouver.