Humorous, elusive, and slyly autobiographical, the multifaceted artworks of Orion Shepherd (b. 1984 Oakland, CA) demonstrate a near-obsessive commitment to charting connections across a range of cultural esoterica. In paintings, sculptures, videos, and design provocations, insignificant objects and marginal subjects—a paperback field guide to ferns; the hardwood floor of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; a banned record cover—become primary icons in a visual world where the human-made meets the organic, and the fictional collides with the real. Indelibly Californian in both style and approach, Shepherd’s practice is best understood as an integral component of—and an expressive response to—the artist’s long engagement with the landscape of the Pacific coast, whether through surfing or exploring, foraging or collecting.

At their core, Shepherd’s artworks amplify otherwise quiet resonances across subcultural, natural, and art histories. By the same ethos that informs fan art, model-making, or imperfect cinematic props, his images often arise from the irresistible human impulse to reproduce, revise, or otherwise personalize what we love. Rendered in a loose but meticulous realism, a painting based on a scene in the 1964 pseudo-documentary The Endless Summer depicts the real and invented books and magazines the surfers use to plot their global route, simultaneously echoing the film’s reliance on fabrication as foundational to fantasy. And in an ongoing conceptual design project called Shepshop, the appropriation of trademarked typefaces and logos, which Shepherd prints on second hand garments from his own collection, blurs distinctions between bootlegs and originals, wearable multiples and retail apparel, serving as coy critiques of self-branding and runaway consumerism.

Iteration, repetition, and the double-sided processes of de- and reconstruction play out across a range of forms and materials, as in the three sculptures on view. Dungeness Masters 1, 2, and 3 (2019) belong to a recent body of assemblages of techno-fossils, shells, quotidian objects, and their handmade replicas. In pairing relics of geologic time alongside the Anthropocene’s everyday trash, Shepherd’s sculptures read as surreal archeological remnants or poetic material puns—as in the rhyming iridescence of abalone shells and scuffed compact discs, cast concrete seashells and the drab plastic housing of obsolete cellular phones. Like jokes told at a beloved’s funeral, these works find tension in their mingled tones of celebration, elegy, and irony.

As one of Shepherd’s recurring motifs, the Dungeness crab, an animal local to the Pacific coast and familiar to the artist from both Bay Area beaches and his childhood kitchen, situates this series in a personal—and perilous—ecological present. Dungeness Masters were first formed of dozens of shells Shepherd gleaned from a Bay Area beach during the crab’s annual molting season. Their first iterations, as simple towers idly arranged, extend the ubiquitous, age-old pastime of balancing rocks into cairns, as well as the use of beach detritus in kitsch décor and shell shop souvenirs. Translated into bronze, the ephemeral stacks become potent totems whose surfaces, thanks to the metal’s material properties, colorfully record the subtleties of passing time, changing weather, and human intervention. To expedite the development of different patinas, Shepherd regularly urinated on these works, and asked collectors to do the same—a tip he took from Andy Warhol’s process in creating his well-known Oxidation paintings—resulting in a range of hues and surface textures. Like future evidence of a post-human world, Shepherd’s sculptures challenge us to imagine which things will survive—organic or synthetic, banal or significant, in ruins or complete—long after we’re gone to see them.

- Leigh N. Gallagher