Shayne Ehman

Shayne Ehman is an elusive young artist whose relationship with the mainstream art world redefines “marginal.” In recent years, he has spent a lot of time living off the grid, camping in the bush of northern Alberta or the Yukon, sometimes gathering and drying wild mushrooms as a way of generating a subsistence income. During the months when he is in Vancouver, he is almost a phantom presence, living near the city’s notorious Downtown Eastside, unreachable by telephone, but with a network of admiring friends and colleagues who have various ideas about how to contact him. His drawings, poems and cartoons have been disseminated in a limited way, through self-published chapbooks as well as in alternative papers and magazines. This all means that the rare occasions on which he exhibits his work publicly are cause for attention—and delight.

“Mountain of Light,” the title of his recent show at the ambitious little Blanket Gallery, alluded to the Koh-i-noor diamond (the largest in the world) and was echoed in the forms that prevail in the three quilts on view. (Koh-i-noor also calls up a famous line of pencils and drawing pens, thus making reference to Ehman’s characteristic graphic practice.) The quilts were collaborations between Ehman, who designed them, and his mother Gloria Taylor, who cut and sewed them with extreme facility and precision.

All feature abstracted references to natural and architectural forms, realized in diamond and cube shapes; Ukrainian Easter egg designs and colours (an allusion to his cultural roots on his mother’s side); and a cartoon entity who recurs throughout Ehman’s work. Known simply as “the Bucktooth character,” and perhaps functioning as Ehman’s comic alter ego, this being assumes different guises in different media and venues. In the quilts he has taken on some of the pointed shapes of the mountain peaks and rooftops that surround him. His features also double as geometric suggestions of fertility, two eyes as breasts and a third eye as a vagina.

The collaborative project seems partly to have been an homage by Ehman to his mother and to quiltmaking traditions, and partly a way of rethinking creativity, fertility and family dynamics. The quilts on view perform an understated dance with ideas about gender and the making of art. In a recent interview, Ehman pointed out their significance as metaphor as well as process, since a mother’s relationship to her young child, he said, is caring and sheltering— keeping the child warm.

Also on view were Ehman’s small drawings and painted poems, some of which will be gathered together in book form at an unspecified time in the future. A colleague of, and occasional collaborator with, the local chapter of drawing-based artists, such as Jason McLean and Marc Bell, Ehman shares with them a Dadaist feeling for anarchic humour, a kind of intentional silliness that thumbs its nose at Establishment values and, behind them, the military-corporate globalization that threatens all life on earth. Like his fellow drawing artists in both Vancouver and Winnipeg, Ehman also manifests through his art a Surrealist dedication to irrationality and the wisdom of dreams, and a cartoon-based, streamof- consciousness approach to processing contemporary culture.

The image-verse work titled Frankenstein Immortal, for example, strings a necklace of disjunct visual and verbal references together, including the green-skinned monster of the title, Garfield the cartoon cat (here given buck teeth), corn nuts, Serpico, a blue push broom, immortality and the soulstealing power of photography. Throughout the show, cartoonstyle images are integrated with cartoon-style lettering—in fact, the lettering is a vital part of the overall work. Perusing the poems as they are laid out on a variety of small sheets of papers—some torn from notebooks or sketchbooks, others grubby and asymmetrical and derived from found sources— it’s easy to remain in the visual moment. However, when Ehman reads the words aloud, they take on an entirely different character and dimension. They’re still surreal in their odd juxtapositions, but rhythmic and sonorous, speaking to another part of the brain. They are also postmodern in their register of fragmentation and their refusal of narrative convention.

Some of the references here are to characters and situations in Ehman’s urban neighbourhood, others to the mushrooms and other fungi he encounters in the wild. (He is extremely knowledgeable about their shapes, colours and properties, but likes to shake things up a little, so that edible morels and chanterelles might be depicted alongside highly poisonous “Destroying Angels” and waxy caps.) Flea market patrons, drop-in centre habitués and back-alley bottle collectors, all are rendered in sympathetic caricature, often with bulbous, red, clown noses (another of Ehman’s recurring motifs).

Most of Ehman’s drawings are optimistic about the human ability to shake off the linked tyrannies of materialism, over-consumption, social inequity, poverty and crime. One of his painted poems, My Hobbies Include Going through Your Recycling at Inappropriate Hours, depicts an East End alley as a clean and safe place, home to a happy binner and a couple of snoozing cats, one pink, one purple. Another work improvises upon the idea of an imaginary city that exists only as a façade (a reference to a story by Italo Calvino), rolled up so that the image and nonimage side of the façade meet, and is then smoked as a big, cheerful joint. This work, Ehman says, suggests a way of transcending “the have/have-not scenario.” It also epitomizes his idealist belief in our ability to live together peaceably—off the grid of greed. ■

“Shayne Ehman: Mountain of Light” was exhibited at Blanket Gallery in Vancouver from May 12 to June 9, 2006.

Robin Laurence is a writer, curator and a Contributing Editor to Border Crossings from Vancouver.