Simply Shatner

Simply Shatner

CALGARY -She calls him simply "Shatner." Not William Shatner, Mr. Shatner or even Bill Shatner, as his Hollywood pals do. Janine Vangool is no friend of Shatner. They have no personal connection. She has communicated to him only through his assistant. She is, she explains, merely an observer. And, as curator of what is surely the first art exhibit dedicated to exploring the man's mystique, she has become a documenter of the cultural phenomenon that is, to sum up in a single word, Shatner.

"Shatner is Shatner," explains Ms. Vangool, owner of Calgary's Uppercase Gallery. "It's a unique character he's created."

Seventy-six artists (one for each year of the man's life) have contributed as many works to The Shatner Show, which opened this month in the tiny downtown gallery and runs until Aug. 15 with a portion of the proceeds going to Mr. Shatner's favourite charity, horse therapy for handicapped children. Works cover the span of a roller-coaster career: One moody gouache portrait recreates a Shatner close-up still from 1962's Judgment at Nuremberg, another alludes to his role in 1965's bizarre horror picture, Incubus, filmed entirely in the constructed universal language of Esperanto.

There are too many Star Trek influences to count, of course. But others represent more contemporary incarnations. There is an enormous Lego bust of Denny Crane, the eccentric lawyer played by Mr. Shatner on Boston Legal (constructed with 9,000 pieces, and with more than 180 hours of work sunk into it by New York artist Sean Kenney, it's the most expensive piece at $16,000). And at least one artist, depicting Mr. Shatner riding a turd like a horse, says he had in mind "regularity" --a nod to the actor's current role as spokesman for All-Bran. That, suggests the artist in question, Clayton Hanmer, or "the big poop could also represent the bulls--t of celebrity and Hollywood-dom that he totally has control of."

Like Mr. Hanmer, most artists seem eager to get beyond the characters that Mr. Shatner plays and into the character of the man himself -- someone who seems uniquely able to simultaneously enjoy his celebrity and mock it. (When Ms. Vangool asked for his blessing, Mr. Shatner e-mailed: "Every artist has their muse. Leonardo was inspired by the ceiling in the great chapel. Who am I to stand in the way of all these fine artists and artisans who want to use my lumpy, ageing face for inspiration?")

The inspiration for the exhibit came last summer, Ms. Vangool says. She and her husband had never given much thought to Mr. Shatner, before. They are not Trekkies, nor avid fans of T.J. Hooker, Rescue 911 or Boston Legal. But on a road trip to Nova Scotia, they listened over and over to Mr. Shatner's 2004 spoken-word album Has Been. In it, the star known most for his pop cultural camp value, offers up sometimes painful reflections on his life. "It has a nice emotional range and [it] intrigued me that he had this other creative side," she says.

Several pieces in the exhibit play with the theme of Mr. Shatner as Lothario. In one imagined mash-up from the legendary Star Trek episode Arena, Kirk's death-struggle with a Gorn lizard becomes a love scene. Several artists are absorbed by Mr. Shatner's Quebec roots, portraying him as the iconic Bonhomme and as a cat (a play on the French transliteration of his name, "Chat-ner").

But given that this is a man who has become a cultural icon, despite never having aspired to acting and who has succeeded in transforming typecast into self-parody, making millions doing so (his estimated $40-million net worth comes more from his work in the past decade than anything from his more serious past), it is remarkable that so many works portray a dark, tortured side.

In one linocut, he sits anxiously on a tree limb, in his pyjamas, gripping his knees to his chest. One disturbing painting shows the Montreal-born actor at a pool-side funeral -- in 1999, he discovered his third wife dead at the bottom of his pool-- while mourners in black swimsuits sip punch.

Amazingly, though, it's Mr. Shatner's mystifying performance of Rocket Man at the 1978 Science Fiction Film Awards that emerges as the dominant theme. At least 16 different works evoke the melodramatic scene, in which a tuxedoed Mr. Shatner, atop a stool lit by a single spotlight, contemplates a cigarette while speaking the lyrics to the Elton John song.

While Ms. Vangool says she asked the artists to treat the subject with "playful reverence," most apparently couldn't escape an image of Mr. Shatner as the enigmatic, rather absurd, Rocket Man: a human of dimensions at odds with each other.

They weren't alone. The most serious work of the exhibit is Shatner Reflecting. In it, an older looking Shatner slumps in a dressing room, cigarette in hand, a scotch on the vanity. There is nothing "playful" about it. It is the one work Mr. Shatner asked to keep for himself.