DodoLab is an experimental, public-focused artist practice led by Lisa Hirmer. DodoLab works with the public and in public exploring and responding to the public life of ideas, public opinion and collective belief. Often modelled as a type of performative research, the work explores and responds to the public’s relationship with contemporary issues—meaning that it is never solely an idea in and of itself that is explored, but rather an idea in relation to the public’s (or more accurately a specific public, counter-public or community’s) understandings and beliefs about that idea.

DodoLab is is focused on developing provocative approaches to working with the public and the nebulous reality of public opinion. This interest in popular ideas and beliefs arises from a conviction in creative production as a meaningful vehicle for discourse, as well as for resistance and change. DodoLab works to create opportunities and mechanisms for meaningful conversation and exchange in the public sphere, drawing out a multitude of voices—from across cultures, generations, social spheres, and sometimes species—and the diverse realities they reflect. By soliciting then working with this complex and often contradictory material, together with participants and other audiences, DodoLab aims to unravel dense ideas and unsettle the seemingly fixed or inevitable. DodoLab is particularly concerned with barriers that prevent change within human ecologies. Through collecting, disseminating, critiquing, annotating, adapting and reconfiguring public-sourced material, the aim is to make work that through exploring these barriers also disrupts them.

To this end, DodoLab employs a range of mediums and strategies—including exhibition, installation, public intervention, performance, art-based research, artist multiples, and experimental forms of publishing—and operates both within gallery and non-traditional settings—often exploring alternative strategies for bringing critical creative work to new publics and drawing the public into the animation of site-specific works. Projects frequently act as a dialogue between DodoLab, the public and other collaborators, with multiple voices being present in the work in layered explorations of an idea. While at its core an artist practice, DodoLab is committed to navigating the sometimes-challenging space between more traditionally defined forms of art making and the realms of community-based and publicly engaged arts, practice-based research and activist practices.

DodoLab was founded in 2009 in Cambridge, Canada. Beginning as a concept for a series of small commissions that focused on bringing creative work into public spaces and exploring the ways popular ideas and beliefs shape the world, DodoLab grew organically through the process of creating new work into a full and prolific art practice. DodoLab frequently works collaboratively with curators and other artists as well as non-artist researchers, scientists, community programmers, etc., who have all made important contributions to the ongoing evolution of the practice, in particular curator Andrew Hunter during DodoLab’s first years.

DodoLab has created projects across Canada and internationally at public galleries, including Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown), Harbourfront Centre (Toronto), University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Kamloops Art Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Foreman Gallery (Lennoxville) and Peninsula Arts (Plymouth, U.K.); with service organizations, such as Trillium Foundation (Sudbury) and the Gosling Foundation (Guelph); municipalities, including Breckland Council (U.K.) and the City of Rijeka (Croatia); and academic groups, including The Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation (University of Guelph), and the Centre for Community Based Research (Kitchener).

DodoLab gratefully acknowledges funding support from the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts and critical early support of Waterloo Architecture.