The artists in the historic grand entrance of cSPACE King Edward, future site of their work. Photos by Jessica Wittman.

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Lane Shordee, Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett are Calgary-based artists with a mutual interest in materiality and transformation. Their collaboration evolved out of shared proximity and ongoing conversation, catalyzing philosophies around time, social engagement, and analog aesthetics.

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Lane Shordee 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.

– Clare Duckett

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Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett work with diverse mediums and materials, ranging from artificial light to re-appropriated urban objects, typically presented in multiple. Their practice combines divergent aesthetic and industrial backgrounds, often resulting in transformative public sculptures and installations. Beckoning viewers with interactive contexts and novel materials, their projects invite strangers to share in experiential moments, prompting collaborative viewership. Using mass-produced objects as a reference to cities as an immeasurable quantity of materials, people, and situations, Brown & Garrett’s practice evokes the possibility of renewed understanding through a critical shift in perspective.

Previous works have appeared internationally, most notably at Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, USA), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (Moscow, Russia), Pera Museum (Istanbul, Turkey), Whanki Museum (Seoul, South Korea),  and festivals throughout Europe and Asia. In 2013, CLOUD was short-listed for an Innovation by Design Award by Fast Company (New York). In 2016, the duo won Winter Stations Design Competition in collaboration with Lane Shordee, developing In the Belly of a Bear for the wintery shores of Lake Ontario in Toronto. They are currently developing their first permanent public artwork in Calgary, Canada.

When working independently, Wayne is a musician, and composer; Caitlind is a co-founder and co-curator of WRECK CITY curatorial collective.