Mowat + the rock A Dadaist in the Maine woods BY MATT ANDERSON

"Do ya see it?" Shea whispered, pointing to a small clearing.

Framed by low-hanging oak trees and waist-deep tangles of juniper and prickly undergrowth, one could just make out a rounded hump, sorta’ like a docile Jurassic beastie, caught in mid-snooze or more likely (relevant to our situation) trapped by a leg-slashing thicket with greedy mosquitoes lying in wait. As we slogged closer, it became clear that its size was in direct measure to the surroundings, dwarfing the surrounding greenery and suddenly towering at a good 12 feet high. It was at that moment I began to understand the two-fold enigma of Shea D. Mowat and his tale of the hovering boulder.

A mutual friend once described Shea as the most "Dada" artist around; that’s not too terribly off-the-cuff when you connect the unlikely strands. For starters, I’m in Harpswell. Known more for its fishing and lobstering, it’s certainly not the first place one might go searching for outsider art. Postcard ideals aside, though, there’s something warm and fuzzy about the little peninsula. With its rugged beauty intermingling with the clamor of donging buoys, that iridescent quality of the mudflats in a certain light, even the occasional waft of pogy bait . . . as a Downeast Dadaist, what’s not to love?

Admittedly, referencing art movements with local colloquialisms can be a little bullshit, so I’ll put it into another context. In the case of Shea’s art, there’s an innate ability to make work that combines a sense of place with an unbridled stream of consciousness, making for a "gestalt" (if you will) that’s as honest as it is slightly wacko.

Driving up and down Harpswell Neck, which he does non-stop in his psychedelic disaster mobile, Shea’s spontaneity shines through not just in the painting of cars, but of canvases, too, and through hilarious art books and innumerable "gifts" that have come to fill my own (and many other friends’) shelves: tinkly piano recordings, brutal noise remixes (with titles like "Sheizer Geyser" or "Kaka Krazy"), photocopied zines (his latest is to be a book of questions, all of which are snipped and compiled from various magazine ads, grocery-store fliers, newspapers, and the like). As a multimedia artist, Shea delivers tenfold.

I recall one performance with Shea wearing a Dukes of Hazzard bedsheet, writhing on the floor of Local 188 — something that probably scarred me for life. Another time, he showed up (rather late) to one of the Sacred & Profane festivals (out on Peaks Island). Presumed missing in action, he was later located in a deep corner of the Battery Steel, wearing a milk crate and a vacuum cleaner hose (resembling an elephant of sorts), eliciting concerned responses from onlookers with his moans.

Breaking with Dada, however, Shea ascribes a reverence to his subject matter that transcends the usual anarchistic flutter, imbibing his work with something almost folklorish. Which leads us to the tale of finding boulders in the woods of Harpswell.

It only made sense that when Shea came across an old daguerreotype (featuring folks having a picnic in front of our aforementioned rock), he’d be inspired to compose a piece of music for it called, "The Last Unicorn’s Lightning Bugs Levitating Landing/Lift-off Pad in the Woods of Maine." With the soundtrack blasting from an unseen source, Shea’s project involves an audience guided to the boulder and instructed to imagine it (I know it’s a stretch) to appear weightless, floating there like some monolithic hovering platform. Afterward, the audience is meant to trundle through the woods on their own, following the soundtrack to its source.

I’ll admit, even for me, the Reverend Crank Sturgeon, a rock transforming into an entity free from gravity seemed at first a wee tad absurd. Shea’s early difficulty in finding the rock led me to wonder if it didn’t in fact get up and wander off on him. Once we found the boulder, however, we promptly hoisted ourselves to the top. There we talked at length about doing art in a way that incorporated ingredients such as time and environment, making for an experience that would operate along the ephemeral, versus an art object created solely to be viewed as decorative.

With our view from the top, rock walls and apple trees delineating property lines recalled a time when the area was inhabited and virtually treeless, the forest something of a combatant to "beat back" as a means of insuring the survival of one’s farmland and livelihood. The woods now returned, I couldn’t escape the idea that this, too, was also temporary, subject to the next phase of history, or more likely the spot for a future million-dollar summer home.

The cherry on top was when it came my turn to locate the soundtrack. Left alone with the boulder, the brambles, and an elusive title (referencing the book, The Last Unicorn), the mission took on the air of chasing that pesky narwhal-horse. In and of itself, the score is a monstrous sound collage, yet the effect of trying to track it down through the woods was that it would become barely audible amidst the rush of rustling leaves. Upon finding the source in a natural amphitheater, the music seemed to escape any manmade pretense; instead its zigzagging noises echoed and belched like an indigenous phenomenon. Did it make the rock hover? I dunno.

Whether it was the sound interacting with a changing landscape, the corporeal effect that a beautiful summer day can have, or Shea’s homage to Harpswell. I gotta admit there was a sensation of feeling aloft.

Matt Anderson can be reached at huso@rcn.com