Plaza Park — SHANE DARWENT

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Plaza Park

The exhibition Plaza Park brings together a collection of recent and new works for the grand opening of The Blue Galleries - part of Boise State University’s newly built arts campus. Plaza Park was organized by gallery director Kirstin Furlong and the artist and was made possibly through generous funding provided by Boise State University and the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Shane Darwent’s sculptures, photographic works and installations mine the roadways of suburban American landscapes as unlikely sites for poetic discovery. Located here is the aspirational mimicry of Postmodern architecture, mundane dilutions of utopian modernism and our contrived efforts of ordering the organic. The exhibition, Plaza Park, reinterprets the built forms of the commercial thoroughfares of contemporary suburbia into a playfully surreal sculptural garden.The ecosystem of objects, encounters and framed views that make up the exhibition situates us in the midst of a heightened pedestrian meander through an ordinarily unassuming landscape. Storefront awnings, turned on end, become buoyant sentinels. Photographic tableaux of strip mall landscapes both distill and complicate our movement through the mundane, while white vinyl siding hovers as illusionistic monoliths.

The intense observation of the ordinary and the navigation of space encouraged by the installation revisits the concept of the dérive– an intentionally aimless wandering through typically urban spaces. The term was coined by French Marxist theorist Guy Debord in 1956 to describe a physical movement through space in opposition to a capitalist or consumerist agenda. For his own contemporary dérive, Darwent's research brings him to the vast suburban rings that surround American cities, which are pockmarked by parking lots, strip malls and multi-lane intersections. Less an act of protest and more one of disconcerted curiosity, Darwent situates himself as a pedestrian within an autocentric landscape. As a result, his walks bring him in intimate contact with the textures, forms and facades of a place which is more often mediated through the window of a passing car.

Fueled by such research, Darwent’s practice teases out the metaphoric possibilities embedded within a landscape we move too quickly through to think critically about. His work acknowledges the built-in obsolescence of our drive through American spaces and the lineage of Edenic impulses that encouraged it along. Rather than simply dismiss the byproducts however, Plaza Park makes an effort to truly engage with the forms therein, and by doing so suggest a greater sense of agency for both the pedestrian and the built vernacular alike.