Lane Shordee
Media: Found Objects, Junk
Lane is a scavenger artist based in Calgary, Alberta. Drawing from construction waste and items found by happenstance, he builds elegant sculptures and installations that both challenge and indulge our relationships with the things we throw away. Lane mines the immediate surplus of materials available, and, informed by his environment, reframes it into cohesive structures, allowing its presumed worth to be re-evaluated. In the same way the term “scavenger” traditionally holds a derogatory connotation, through new perspective, it can become something of considerable merit and nobility. His process is of an organic and sometimes comical nature that toys with semiotics, functional aesthetics, and happy coincidence – shapes and forms are left to chance or whimsy. It is this playful flexibility that grants each piece an inherent naivety and warm charm. Works begin as sketched schematics which are fleshed out and assembled from objects on hand, objects he can construct, and objects he must seek out. He maintains a steady cache of lost and found objects to be adjudicated and reworked. Embracing shift and impermanence, Lane abides by the notion that we live in a cultural mash-up of ideas rooted to all parts of history – as with memory, each idea becomes new with every attempt to access and re-create it. As such, materials are engaged in a dialogue-of-bricolage, and a collaboration ensues, informed by space, ecology, and the history of the engaged article. Recovered items are respected and regarded as a natural urban resource, and thus reclaimed as artful by-products of by-products – in effect, a dissemination of our individual ideas of consumption and waste.