Shayne Dark

Walking through “Here and Gone,” Shayne Dark’s recent exhibition at the Edward Day Gallery in Toronto, is like walking through a hallucinatory world, a magic kingdom of giant, colourful forces of nature—flames, waterfalls, storms—things one doesn’t often get a chance to experience, at least not in waking life.

The exhibition is made up of five separate pieces, objects that Dark interchangeably refers to as sculptures, installations and drawings, each one using branches of ironwood, a very dense, hardwood that grows in abundance around Dark’s home, 45 kilometres north of Kingston, Ontario.

The most stunning work of the show is Blizzard, a 16-footlong and 10-foot-wide spray of branches protruding from the wall and painted white, though not just any old white, a popping white, a white so bright it verges on fluorescence. Visible from three sides, the tree limbs look like charging snowflakes, much like the hypnotic, mid-winter sensation felt while driving through a snowstorm after dark. In fact, it was while doing this very thing that he was struck with the overwhelming urge to translate the experience into a more permanent state.

Like Blizzard’s exuberance, On Fire 2 is an enormous collection of bright red branches bound together by an industrial conduit, the only non-natural source material in the show. In fire-engine red, the work looks like an abandoned game of pick-up sticks or a bundle of static flames, playfully enormous and seemingly hot to the touch.

The final large piece of the exhibition is Descent, a deep blue waterfall-like structure made from 150-year-old split rail fences that Dark uses both for their historical presence and their aesthetic uniqueness, lured by their uneven edges and the irreproducible wear of time. Affixed to the wall, the blue “water” tumbles to the floor, splashing up in various wooden heights, creating an exciting pixilated deluge.

Two peripheral pieces, In Due Time and In Due Time 2, are made from smaller ironwood branches arranged at various intervals on the wall. Delicate in comparison to their much larger counterparts, the pieces epitomize Dark’s use of the gallery as integral to his entire process, where the work’s final form isn’t fully determined until he is in situ, driving branches into their temporary resting places. The last time Blizzard was installed, for example, it was far more streamlined. In the end, this unpredictability of form effectively augments the act of installation to near-performance, breathing new life into the dead trees.

For almost 12 years now, Dark has been interested in playing out the cycle of birth, growth and death inside and outside gallery walls. First he “cherry-picks” his branches, spending days and sometime weeks finding the perfect subjects to work with in his studio. With no real, fixed criteria for this ideal specimen, he waits to feel that deep-down tremor of rightness to signal success. Once found, he drags the branches inside, sands them down to their hearts—a convenient metaphor if ever there was one—and covers them with theatre paint to achieve the deep, saturated tones (rather than reflecting light, theatre paint absorbs it, making the colours appear much richer). In the last stages, Dark assembles the branches based on rough sketches, and finally fits and secures them into their designated spaces.

Now, it is possible to see these fantastical sculptures as inquiries into a variety of timely subjects: the taming of nature, or the examination of manufacturing and industrial processes; the plasticity of outside/inside and natural/artificial relationships; or the psychology of affected landscape and the need for escape, however fleeting.

But while these are stimulating ways into the work, the real pleasure and success of the show lies less in heady, analytical interpretation and more in the primal and wordless reaction to the intensity of colour and the familiar—and at the same time unfamiliar—objects. Any enthusiastic descriptor glosses over the actual fact of Dark’s odd, mythical forest: This augmented form and colour supercede all worldly references. This is colour-field in Brocéliande, Minimalism through the Fire Swamp, Fauvist Elysian fields, a technicolour Walden Pond. With this forest, Dark is artist, industrialist, conservationist, manufacturer, historian and myth-maker all rolled into one. ■

“Here and Gone” was exhibited at Edward Day Gallery in Toronto from July 13 to August 6, 2006.

Julia Dault is a New York-based artist and writer.