SHAYNE DARK

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If Canadian artist Shayne Dark's sculpture were candy, their ingredients list would warn, "Contains natural and artificial flavors." For his ongoing sculpture series "Habitat," Dark collects sticks from the lake near his Ontario home; its waters yield sleek branches stripped of bark by scavenging beavers. He then douses them in saturated colors that conceal their grain under layers of powdery matte paints.

Covered so uniformly in high-key primary colors, they seem cast from pure pigment--and extremely fragile. But they act much hardier than they look: Dark sometimes arranges them as to look as if they're penetrating walls, like tenacious weeds through concrete. The artist's four works on view at the Canadian Embassy exploit the tensions between the natural and the man-made with intriguing results.

Two of Dark's sculptures cluster his Technicolor branches in neat half-spheres; the arrangement pits the sticks' irregular curves against their regimented formation. In the all-yellow "Resurrection," sticks emanate from a central point, like a starburst. The orange-red "Habitat" has them piled atop each other, in a neat, perfectly rounded pile. Both attain a curious equilibrium.

Dark's two blue pieces take advantage of their alien color. The 25-foot-long wood limbs in "East Gate," leaning up against the gallery wall, seem suffused with their own intelligence. Like that mysterious jelly in "The Blob," these sticks seem insatiably curious: Long wooden fingers reach through the second-story balcony railing, as if in search of--something. In a small untitled work, spindly sticks appear to penetrate walls. Our rational, white-box galleries can't hem in nature for too long, it seems.      

Jessica Dawson  is Art  Critic for The Washington  Post