"Oh, to be a young Canadian artist!” an American painter friend once exclaimed. “Just out of school, and their résumés are always twice as long as ours!” True enough: by U.S., European and Asian standards, talented young Canadian artists aren’t short of exhibition opportunities. The larger artistic challenge, though, beyond basic subsistence in what remains one of the absolutely toughest ways to make a living, is how to age successfully. And here globalization, which began reshaping the art world in the ’80s, has been good for Canadian artists of many ages. They speak to a broader audience and in more polyglot forms than at any time before. The information revolution, globalization’s primary tool, has hit the art world as well. As a result, an artist from Calgary may have more in common with someone from Cologne or Boston, following an affinity of interest reinforced by the Internet. Thanks to the World Wide Web, artists can see one another’s work and exchange e-mail addresses, perhaps after meeting at a constellation of big international shows—and in the past two decades, the Canadian presence at those shows has grown exponentially. Indeed, Canada today can arguably boast of many more internationally celebrated artists than can France. At first glance, much of the work of younger Canadian artists, like those shown here, looks like kid stuff, literally. But when it comes to art, you should always look again, and then again. In fact, a sophisticated sense of playful humor is the one thing that most of the bright, young Canadians you’ll see in these pages have in common—along with a growing international respect for their work.

Geoffrey Farmer: Vancouver

Here is some of what you get in Geoffrey Farmer’s Hunchback Kit, an installation piece that spins variations on The Hunchback of Notre Dame. There’s a monk’s robe, a Spanish-language edition of Victor Hugo’s novel, an instructional video on theater makeup, a pair of cardboard shoes for someone with a clubfoot, a Styrofoam tambourine, a blue lightbulb and a luminescent walking staff. And did we mention the goat-hair mat?

Farmer operates in that sometimes forbidding, sometimes absorbing art-world territory, the multimedia installation. A typical work—if there is such a thing for him—might include found objects, collectibles and various kinds of telling ephemera. He adds all that interesting whatever to items that he has made himself or had fabricated. For instance, there was the puppet, copied from a photograph of himself, that he arranged to have produced for his 2001 piece Puppet Box—a work, he says, about the “life of the inanimate object.” Those bits and pieces might be further combined with videos related to the work—for instance, man swings big mallet. Think Lon Chaney, large bell.

Come across a Farmer piece in a museum, and you find those items distributed here and there. What you should do is stroll among them and draw your own connections. For Hunchback Kit he provides galleries and exhibition spaces with a 10-ft.-tall crate roughly in the shape of a videocassette. It contains the work’s myriad pieces, more than 90 all together, which the curator removes and may place wherever. It’s not that installation work is nonjudgmental; it’s that the judgments are yours.

Some of Farmer’s work is an off-kilter variation on fandom, the way its obsessions unearth deeper meanings. At the beginning of many pieces, he has in mind a movie or book. He does research into the ways that the beloved thing has been picked up by the larger culture, as memorabilia, low-culture relics, cheap multiples. Then he starts making his own paraphernalia, looking for ways in which the original film or novel brushed up against our fears and desires, searching for how its little artifices became the mental furniture of our imaginings. The Hunchback of Notre Dame? Who hasn’t felt like him at some point? As the Beatles said, “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight, a long time.” —Richard Lacayo

Germaine Koh: Toronto

If you had visited Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery in May 2001, you would have seen what looked like an empty room. But closer inspection would have revealed movement everywhere: thousands of tiny silver ball bearings falling from tubes suspended overhead, accompanied by a faint metallic purr, like rain tapping off a roof. The gentle downpour was the work of Germaine Koh, who has won international acclaim for her subtle interventions into the fabric of daily life, bringing the humdrum and the invisible into a quietly expressive new light.

Koh’s ball-bearing rain juxtaposes the artist’s memories of the busy clatter of Japanese pachinko balls with a view of the West Coast’s weather. Another Koh piece, a machine that translates computer keystrokes into smoke puffs of Morse code, gives an eccentric visibility to the invisible labor of an anonymous clerical worker: nature and culture change places, like partners in a dance. In a constantly accelerating world, Koh’s subtle, engaging constructions create quiet internal and external spaces for reflection.

Born in Malaysia in 1967, Koh emigrated to Canada at age 2. Since 1990, her art has been shown in most major Canadian cities as well as in London and Mexico City. There is no such thing as a typical Koh work. Since her first major show at Ottawa’s Gallery 101 in 1991, she has published short excerpts from her diary as classified-ad messages; installed a tall steel pole in the middle of a busy footpath to divide walkers into two groups whose membership can never be predicted—those who turn left and those who turn right—and constructed a pedestrian turnstile that revolves in response to the winds sweeping over an art-gallery roof. Uniting these creations is Koh’s fierce desire to displace ordinary things from the contexts in which we usually absorb them. —By Christopher Brayshaw

Damian Moppett: Vancouver

In a series of photographs by Vancouver artist Damian Moppett, six different goats—the really matted, dirty, furry kind straight out of a 17th century pastoral scene, twisted horns and all—are documented in what amount to matter-of-fact portraits. Captured lushly in a green meadow, these pictures are cautiously ironic and strangely beautiful. They are the first Moppett has made that in some oblique way link him to the landscape-based, largely photographic imagery that has held sway in Vancouver—the work of such well-known artists as Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham.

Born in Calgary, Moppett, 33, is part of an emerging generation of Vancouver artists involved in something altogether different from their teachers. Though initially a painter, he is primarily a maker of photography, constructing banal still-life pictures of sculptural messes he makes himself and the occasional photographic homage, like this self-portrait as Hollis Frampton, the late American filmmaker and photographer. Moppett has moved on to room-size installations that incorporate a range of media, including sculpture, drawings and video. His activities as lead guitarist in his own band are also creeping into his work. And he has made several series of still-life pictures of detritus—everyday trash—carefully arranged in a way that somehow highlights its subtly erotic or gendered nature. The raw materials have included Lego pieces and flaccid balloons, and, more recently, formless blobs of plaster culled by the artist and casually shaped into something like sculpture. On some level, Moppett’s whole enterprise evolves an ongoing critique of masculinity and its accoutrements, which include modernist buildings, cigarette butts and guitars, not to mention billy goats. In a recent Toronto exhibition, Moppett’s most ambitious project to date juxtaposed a sculpture cum skateboard ramp and a series of beautifully crafted drawings modeled after 17th century Dutch kermis-landscape paintings. Like some of his talented peers in this emerging generation, Moppett succinctly mines the slippage between a 21st century pastime and a personal preoccupation with art about art. —Connie Butler

Euan Macdonald: Los Angeles

What is it with Euan Macdonald? The little things of life are big to him. This could be thought of as what the art world calls minimalism. The artist cordons off some morsel of existence, like, say, an orange square, which makes it loom large. When the object is considered long enough, its essence bears down upon you, the viewer, in a way that makes you think hard about just what essences are. This helps to explain Ball, a video by Macdonald that gives you bounce. It offers a yellow ball bouncing—loudly—on a featureless dark surface. Actually, it’s a video loop of a single bounce endlessly repeated, the minimalist essence of action. It would not be true to say that nothing happens in this video. What happens is that nothing happens and happens and happens—a bouncing ball. Somewhere around minute 10, you no longer know whether to laugh or think seriously about just what action is. On the whole, you bounce between both responses. Which may be what Macdonald had in mind.

For the past three years, Macdonald, 37, has lived in Los Angeles, but he was born in Edinburgh and raised partly in the British Midlands before coming to Canada at age 14. He began his art career making paintings and drawings, and still produces works on paper and even sculpture. In recent years he has turned increasingly to video, where his specialty is the canny cosmic joke.

Art like Macdonald’s takes some courage. He’s not afraid to be annoying. (That ball!) He’s not afraid to be minor key. Above all, he’s not afraid to be funny. In Three Trucks, a two-minute video, a trio of ice-cream trucks converge at a single point and menace one another with competing versions of inane ice-cream-truck music. As an image of infantile aggression, it’s more fun than a killer clown. Macdonald sees it as “a pocket of urban chaos—I wanted to show the slapstick beauty of gridlock.” In Brakestand, a man starts a parked car. As the rear wheels spin and screech and shoot smoke, the front tires stay locked in place. This goes on for more than 15 minutes. “There’s a nod to the infinite in the videos,” says Macdonald. “None of them have endings. They depict actions that you can imagine going on forever.” Euan Macdonald makes the kind of comedy that would have made Samuel Beckett smile. —Richard Lacayo

Marcel Dzama: Winnipeg

If the cliché about the worth of a single picture is right, then in the past five years, Marcel Dzama, 27, has created the equivalent of 6 million words. Since his graduation from the University of Manitoba School of Art in 1997, Dzama has produced some 6,000 delightfully odd drawings, the majority of them sold in commercial art galleries in Winnipeg, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Zurich, Berlin and São Paulo. Dzama has already had 40 one-person exhibitions, in which he regularly installs anywhere from 150 to 400 of his simply composed and delicately rendered drawings, all executed in a pigment made from a root-beer base that he can buy only in Wadena, Saskatchewan.

Dzama is the unofficial laureate of the weirdly charming. His drawings, of everything from a naked woman exercising discreet bedside manners in the presence of a debonair, pajama-clad bear to men with human bodies and tree heads, have an air of innocence—almost literally, because of the faint aroma of root beer that clings to them. You never quite know what will appear in the world according to Dzama, though it will probably involve animals and humans commingling in puzzling situations. Bears feed honey to acquiescent rabbits; a buxom woman either dances or struggles with a man-size cat; an Amelia Earhart look-alike rides an elongated hare with eight legs; a cowboy ties up a hippopotamus; a clown plays cards with a deep-sea diver. The effect of the work is both comforting and disorienting.

For all the humorous geniality of Dzama’s cartoonish, B-movie world of juxtaposition, violence also stalks the surfaces. The drawings engage elements of the absurd, the fantastic, the erotic and the genuinely disturbing. A supine woman in one image could be sleeping, except for the two dozen punctures that turn her body into a piece of Swiss cheese, while nearby stand three birds—a mother and her young—their sharp beaks stained an incriminating red. In another drawing, a cowboy whose legs are amputated below the knee is buried underground as if he were a specimen in an ant farm. Caught somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Alfred Hitchcock yet imbued with an abiding love of his Saskatchewan hometown, Dzama is the foremost exemplar of Postmodern Canadian prairie gothic. —By Robert Enright