Conservation as an art form
Scavenger artist sources material from the trash
Lane Shordee refers to himself as a “scavenger artist” and his friends at the Pith Gallery, awed by his powers of industriousness, believe that he possesses the soul of a pioneer.
They compare him to American folk hero and frontiersman Davy Crockett, although, wacky fictitious inventor Caractacus Pott (from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) and Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, are also names that come up.
For a more modern, pop-culture context, think MacGyver — if the TV hero was a Dumpster diver.
For his pioneer-themed art exhibition Hello Neighbour, on through July 17 at Inglewood’s Pith Gallery, Shordee has constructed a life-size horse carriage out of scavenged materials which he found, mostly, by foraging through garbage cans in Calgary’s Mount Royal district.
Old planks and discarded bathroom doors salvaged from a high-school renovation, wooden cable drums and aluminum sheets found in construction site waste bins, a retired fire department hose, junk furniture, fence boards, are among the materials that went into the project.
Shordee says the carriage is built to be fully functional and he’s determined to prove it on July 7 when he’ll invite visitors to the Pith Gallery to pile into his creation and go for a horse-drawn ride around Inglewood.
“It might fall apart,” says the 32-year-old, who very much looks like a man you might find digging through a Dumpster, from his sawdust and sweat musk to the grit and grime under his fingernails. “There’s always that element of risk. . . . But I’m confident in it.”
At least as impressive as the carriage is the 12-gauge shotgun Shordee built using a found shotgun shell, a length of steel pipe
To me, scavenging, searching for something, is kind of
Zen
LANE SHORDEE
and a part from a sink’s drain valve among other things. For the wooden base of the gun, he used old signs that read Private and Enter at Your Own Risk, messages that seem in keeping with the spirit of the weapon.
The gun is labelled The Big Bang and it does fire. Proof can be seen on YouTube (type in Lane Shordee’s Homemade Shotgun Test: A Mini-Doc).
But the Hello Neighbour exhibition is about more than just the novelty of Shordee’s constructions. There is also an underlying commentary about the virtues of conservation.
“It brings attention to the kinds of material that people throw out,” Shordee says. “I like to see its potential . . . and I get to transform it into something else.” By doing so, he feels that he’s making a connection to Alberta’s pioneer past — a theme in keeping with this year’s 100th anniversary of the Calgary Stampede.
“I think people will relate to the idea of being like a pioneer and using the material you have at hand to make things work,” Shordee says.
As he sees it, there’s also a spiritual component to Hello Neighbour.
“To me, scavenging, searching for something, is kind of Zen,” he says. “When you’re looking for a particular type of material, you have to be patient and wait for it. Then, when it shows up it’s this grand thing. You feel as if the universe has given you a gift.”
That’s how he felt last year when he moved into a century-old rental house in Mount Royal and discovered that the garage in the back was initially used to build horse carriages.
That inspired the concept of Hello Neighbour and soon Shordee, with a wooden pack on his back and a makeshift rickshaw attached to his bike — both of which were also fashioned from scavenged parts — began foraging through the Dumpsters of his neighbourhood, searching for the material needed to make his vision a reality.
Transporting the parts piece by piece to the 100-year-old garage, he began assembling the carriage and the rest of the exhibition.
Once he completed the carriage, he then disassembled it, transporting the parts with his trusty bike and rickshaw (which he’s dubbed the Particle Accelerator) to the former bottle depot and crackhead hangout turned underground art gallery that is the Pith Gallery.
The process, filmed in stopanimation style, will be there for the world to see, projected onto a wall of the Pith Gallery during showings.
When it comes to his waste-not want-not approach, Shordee goes to great lengths. Two painting/ sculptures in the exhibition are made from the scraps of leftover wood that he accumulated while constructing his carriage.
Even the paint on those works, which are titled, appropriately enough, Leftover Soup, is homemade.
Shordee explains that he burns his wood and collects the ash and soot, mixing it into the concoctions with which he creates his palette of colours.
By recreating artifacts of the pioneer past out of discarded materials found in the present, Shordee feels that he’s creating a valuable link between eras.
“I’m making a comparison between what the city’s become and what it used to be,” he says. “I’m not quite a historian and I’m not quite a future modernist. I’m somewhere in between.”