ROCKLAND — As a kid, Maine native Kevin Cyr would go camping with his parents and older brothers every summer in a 1977 fiberglass pop-up Apache. Living in Madawaska, the northern most town in Maine, the family would often spend two weeks, just over the Canadian border at a French campground. Starting when Cyr was about eight years old, those were some fond memories.

“I went to bed early, so I usually got an entire wing of the pop-out to myself,” he said.

Cyr, who graduated from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, had always gravitated toward drawing and painting old vehicles.

“I liked drawing working vehicles and I think that mostly stemmed from growing up in a blue-collar paper mill town,” he said.  Later, as a bike messenger in Boston, Cyr would often pass those junked cars by the side of the road.

“When I’d go back the next day, they were usually gone, towed away,” he said. “That was also around when the SUV craze started taking off and I wanted to find a way to preserve these cool, old vehicles that were going by the wayside in favor of these modern vehicles.”

For the last 15 years or so, he has painted a series of them. Then, on a work trip to Beijing, he noticed rickshaws, the three-wheeled cargo bikes.

“Because I was a bike messenger, I was really enthralled with them and began doing tons of drawings of them as well. One day, I was goofing off and I drew a camper on the back of one of them.”

That confluence of ideas fit Cyr's utilitarian perspective of self-sufficiency on the road and afterwards spurred him to create a show titled Home in the Weeds, examining the idea of shelter as a safe haven for a future worst-case scenario, as well as more optimistic notions of home and self-preservation.

The show included the "Little Tag Along," a small camper towed by a bicycle as well as other shelters and installations. After an exhibition in San Francisco, he had the 445-pound Little Tag Along trucked to Maine for the Center for Maine Contemporary Art's first Rockland pop-up show, which opened on June 5 on Lime Street. Sharing the show with another artist Sean O'Brien, Cyr's show was all about self-preservation, adventure, mobility, habitats and housing.

Little Tag Along was the CMCA show’s prominent piece. Deliberately hand-painted in those ugly brown burnt orange stripes of the 1970s-era campers, it seems to be resting by the side of the road next to a vintage 1970s Raleigh bike. As Cyr and his wife watched his 14-month-old son crawl inside the tiny unit, many people poked their heads inside to see what was in it. All of the essential survival tools you’d expect from a kid who grew up in the 1980s to have: Lantern, an old cooking grill hidden beneath the bench, pocket knife, vintage fan and a clunky radio-TV unit.

Today, every private campground in Maine seems to have tent sites that come with WiFi.  So, where was the iPad and mp3 players and all of the devices modern day campers in this exhibit? Exactly.

“Can you actually sleep in there?” was the main question people asked Cyr.  In fact, he built the bench and side table panels to dovetail into a flat bed that could fit his height exactly, 5’ 8”. Yet, he has only used it as an exhibit; he has not yet slept in it himself.

“It was really built to be an exhibit, not so much as a functional piece,” he explained.

Wandering through this exhibit, his other drawings and paintings of old camping vans RVs are worth checking out, including the camper he paintings on a rickshaw. In all of them, we imagine ourselves in them, speeding away from our everyday lives loaded up with only the necessary items for survival. This is a fun exhibit for anyone who has ever gone camping, but makes a larger statement that the latest tech gadget rolling off the shelves is not necessarily better than its predecessor. 

“I have a lot of old iPods that don’t work anymore,” he said, “but my old cassette player — it still works.”

The show runs until July 5. For more information visit: cmcanow.org/calendar or http://www.kevincyr.net

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com