SHAYNE DARK

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Canadian Art Magazine - Spring 2006 - In Review

John K. Grande

Shayne Dark’s sculptures can look like biotic designs. But for all their allusions to a natural world, to evolution and environment, they are wholly synthetic. After a stint at the Kiwi Sculpture Garden near Perth, Ontario, where it was exhibited as part of a sculpture event amid perennials, greenhouses and rambling forest paths, Dark’s Into the Blue made it’s way to Toronto, where it now stands in the Queen West courtyard that houses both the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and Edward Day Gallery.

Passersby and locals stop to look at this strange hybrid sculpture. It reaches up like a plant form magnified in scale by some biogenetic manipulation or freak event. Or it could be a special-effects prop for a scene from a sci-fi film like The Day of the Triffids. Whatever the case may be, the sculpture offsets the city environment, and brings beauty and colour with expansive forms that draw their cues from nature. Long live plasticity, natural or synthetic!  

The creation of Into the Blue involved collecting and assembling ironwood trees found near Dark’s home in Sydenham, Ontario. The antenna-like orientation of these beautiful undulating forms underscores the diversity inherent to all growth forms in nature, but also challenges the belief that manufacture need be exclusively human-generated to be artistically meaningful or significant. Coated with ultramatte blue paint (usually used for theatre and set design), Dark’s trees are strangely surreal. Whatever the season, the sculpture enlivens the environment with its aura of life.