Shane Darwent

Exhibitions

Two-person Exhibition, Plastic Sunrise, 2023

---

Shane Darwent fabricates large-scale minimalist sculptures that take the form of stark, mutated storefront awnings. These internally lit structures feel at once familiar and alien: black vinyl wrapping around steel ribs, voids haloed in fluorescent glow creating an illusory flatness, primary colored vinyl reversed and internally illuminated. These constructions are subconsciously associated with a specific function and context: advertisement and shelter; perennial cycles of urban renewal and decay. Each sculpture amalgamates these familiar forms and materials into confrontational monolith, marking an inversion of the passive relationship typical between individual and architecture.

Here, the usually-ambient cycles of urban renewal/decay become foreground. The sculptures instigate a spatial rearrangement—their inner-constructions alternately shrouded and illuminated—as viewers navigate the gallery space and view the works from different vantage points. The sculptural works reflect the ambivalence of a built environment that has an undeniable, austere beauty; in which entropy yields ruins while development births pristine new fabrications a block over; an environment that bears a lived history, inscribed with territorial machinations of capital, of displacement, but also of placemaking. He lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

︎︎︎ View artist’s website