Shane Dwyer’s Plastic Shorelines

Emma Butler Gallery | October 18- November 1, 2025

By Lisa Moore

Shane Dwyer’s solo exhibit at the Emma Butler Gallery is stunning. The concept as crisp and brilliant as a Tide detergent container washed up on a grey shore. That particular bright orangish red, so sharp and stabbing. 

Dwyer set about collecting garbage of all sorts from beaches in Newfoundland—La Hay Beach, near St. Mary’s; a beach near St. Shott’s and others—where he found washed-up fishing gear, plastic materials of all sorts, broken bits of fish buckets; and industrial metals. So much he might have filled a dump truck at each beach. The plastics come in the colours of the very commercial, consumer-grabbing brightness of late capitalism. The industrial garbage—nylon fishing nets, grids of metal, perhaps chicken wire (often things meant to hold objects or animals back, perhaps even landslides), are used as stencils to create a variety of textures and marks in Dwyer’s artwork. 

Here is the sublime. So eye-spankingly gorgeous and seductive are Dwyer’s vivid hues, one cannot easily turn away. If a viewer is one of those rare people who experiences synesthesia, this delicious palette might cause the saliva ducts to squirt. Colours that vibrate on the canvas, complementary jewel tones rubbing against each other causing animate shimmer, so spectacle bright they appear as if lit from within. Fiercely ersatz and unnatural, so illicit and brash, the eye is drawn all over Dwyer’s canvases as if the viewer is on speed—if an eye could get whiplash? These paintings might cause the attraction of a train crash from which the viewer cannot tear their gaze away. Beauty and fear duking it out on each canvas in a drama of composition and colour. 

Climate crisis is the subject here and we are startled into perceiving it through the evocation of the sublime. We are temporarily lulled by Dwyer’s eloquent mark making and the harmony he creates with disparate textures and colours; we experience the pleasurable tinge of fright, but fright at a distance. A terror mitigated by the numbness of nimbyism. The beach being, not exactly in our backyard, but the liminal space between us and the seemingly unknowable void of the ocean and what we have dumped into it, hoping that when the waves close over our filth it will be forever invisible, repressed. Such bright colours remind me of William Blake’s poem “The Sick Rose”; I think of the ‘crimson joy’ that the invisible worm takes in destroying the rose with its ‘dark secret love.’ Desire and death together.

Crimson, tangerine orange, lime green, lemon yellow—except it is not correct to suggest fruits when describing these colours, (unless they are genetically modified) because they are human made hues, over-saturated with the metaphorical meaning of their industrial, hazard-warning unnaturalness. The shadowy stencil marks of metal grids sometimes create a texture that resembles lace, a reference to a simpler, more slow-moving time, and a nostalgia for a lost knowledge of craft. The fingerprints of industrial activity replacing the handmade.  

I think of the natural debris artist Don Wright represented, found along shorelines back in the 80’s—the worn and silvered textures of driftwood or the dried-up witches’ purses that called forth the aesthetics of natural decay. Wright’s work, considered side by side with Dwyer’s, shows the dizzying escalation of damaging debris. Wright’s “Red Trench” was a reference to an industrial trench gouged in the earth, but it was temporary. Dug in shifting sands, washed away by the tide. The “Red Trench,” when full of water and lit by the sunset, represented menstrual blood, a reference to the circle of life. Dwyer’s paintings reflect debris that cannot decompose but interrupt the circle of life by destroying biodiversity. 

I think of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened Campbell’s soup cans—Dwyer uses a similar technique of bringing commercial design and advertising palettes into the gallery space, questioning the validity of hierarchy in the arts—but Dwyer is doing so for a more radical end, drawing attention to destruction by deploying similarly pleasing images. 

Dwyer’s multi-media paintings ride the line between representational landscapes and abstraction. The aesthetic soft line between the two modes of representation suggests the quick-shifting nature of the beach, itself a liminal space. Pollution and what is not yet defiled commingle here, inextricable from each other, and beg the question: Is there anything left that is not defiled? The more we accept the nature of garbage in nature, the more our human nature (if such a thing exists) is altered and the more disturbing this work becomes. 

And as we see in this Dwyer’s images, the ocean is projectile vomiting our poison. Here is Freud’s theory of the return of the repressed. We crave the ease of plastics, and all that oil affords, we want it so bad—gimme, gimme—this disposable culture the short cut to leisure time, exhausted as we all are by fascism, AI, the poisoning of water tables by mining precious metals for our computers and smart phones, and the stealth of neoliberalism chomping up our time. So, we continue to use plastics and burn gas, and bury the spoils in the ocean, only to have it heaved back out at us in technicolor. We even feel nostalgia for the bakelite products (the world’s first synthetic commercial plastic) of the past when we didn’t know quite so much, and were more adept at repressing the consequences of our fast and furious efforts to slow down. And how ironic that the beach is the quintessential site of leisure, the liminal space between the void and the colonial view, between labour and vacation, now dirty and dangerous. 

And I think of Milton’s line, “No light but rather darkness visible”—Dwyer uses his neon uber-bright palette, to make the darkness visible. Shane Dwyer’s exhibit is a cri de coeur, elegant and loud. 

Lisa Moore is the author of the bestselling novels Alligator, February, and Caught; the story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and a young adult novel, Flannery. Her books have been finalists for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, CBC Canada Reads, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Man Booker Prize. Lisa lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.