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Sculpture Magazine - Focus article - November 2002 GIL McELROY - Poet, Independent Curator, and Art Critic The Geometry of Defense The
work of Hartington, Ontario artist Shayne Dark lies apart from the
sculptural objects he actually produces. A piece itself a thing of
discernible mass, dimensions and colors is but a gateway to the actual art
work located in that realm between, as he writes, its clear identity as a
physical thing and its psychological aspect. It’s a transcendent
localization best exemplified by Quarter
Round (2001) where fully 75% of the sculpture can in fact be said to
be non-material. Wedged into the ninety degree angle of a gallery corner, Quarter Round employs a quarter section of a circle as a surface
upon which Dark has placed thousands of steel ball bearings of varying
sizes that, while randomly laid down, unavoidably form disorganized relief
patterns. The two sides of the quarter circle are bounded by matching
triangular mirrors. The result is, of course, a reflection which completes
the circle and visually organizes the arbitrary ball bearing reliefs into
a symmetrical pattern. Dark’s
sculpture weave a path between the natural and the artefactual, making use
of the inherent strengths of both in works primarily based on shapes of
simple geometry. Cones, disks, and circles figure largely in much of his
recent work, like Zero (2000),
an installation composed of a large heap of broken windshield glass
carefully arranged into a thick disk on the gallery floor, deep from
within which glows the bright orange of a circular neon tube. Two separate
wall reliefs both entitled Quality
of Silence (2000) employ geometrical shapes combined in a hierarchical
fashion, from their overall conical form, flattened with a diameter
greater than height (and, in one of the pieces, with a rounded peak more
akin to a nipple) down to the more atomic scale of thousands of tiny
spheres-industrial steel ball bearings bonded together within the
sculptural matrices. In Neo
(2000), Dark reverses the process, implanting the geometric shape of a
large magnet into a gallery wall and submerging it beneath 9000 ball
bearings bound together within its unseen magnetic field. In
the series Twist (2001), Dark
takes a simple geometric shape--a triangular figure with convex sides--and
subjects it to the forces of both recursive multiplication and torque. The
result is something sculpturally akin to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, the spatial equivalent, perhaps, of an
object's movement materially traced through time. Dark cut pieces of
plywood of the same triangular shape, stacked them atop one another and
sandwiched the whole structure between matching steel plates. In the
stacking process, each slice of wood was rotated slightly out of alignment
with the previous piece to create a twisting shape. Each work in the
series was sanded smooth to form a continuous surface, then coated in a
resin that highlights color distinctions in each plywood layer. The result
is an elegant series of stratified and highly torqued columnar pieces. In
a group of sculptures collectively entitled Habitat, Dark again works within an overriding geometrical
imperative, taking objects from the natural world (in this case de-barked
branches of wood) painting them inbright, primary colors, and arranging
them within the confines of a particular shape. But it’s geometry
with a twist, a geometry of resistance and defense, a military
geometry--more associated with defensive ramparts, bastions, and military
fortifications than with ideal forms. In Donna’s
Room (2000), the installational setting determines the constraining
geometry. The spiky ends of a densely packed mass of branches-all painted
the same bright red-emanate from a rectangular ground-level window in a
stone faced. Donna’s Room
bristles with a provocative defensive tension, aggressively transfiguring
the architecture of window and wall. (In a diffused incarnation of the
piece intended for the floor, Dark weaves the same spiky red branches
together into a large circular mound with a more than passing resemblance
to the protective structure of a beaver lodge.) Other
works from the same series denote a wary guardedness and fortified sense
of self-preservation that transcend narrow geometric austerity. In Resurrection
(1999), painted yellow branches are arranged hemispherically, radiating
outward from a central core. The piece sits flat on the floor, resembling
a spiky sea urchin, seemingly impervious to any approach save the visual.
And the ring of interwoven white branches encircling an empty inner space
in Untitled
(2002) resonates a simple defensive posturing, reminiscent of pioneer
wagon circles in an old movie Western. In
Shayne Dark’s sculpture, geometry is anything but neutral. Though bound
up within its seemingly simple imperatives, his work in fact and deed
brushes aside the narrow aesthetic of self-referential Minimalism in which
it is often cloaked. Instead, it inhabits both the rarified air of
Platonic idealism, and, when it finally comes to ground, the deadly shapes
of stringent martial exigencies. Gil McElroy is an independent curator and critic living in Colborne, Ontario, Canada. |