Severed hands, grinning skulls, dripping guts—it’s difficult to reconcile these grisly, death-metal-style images with their seemingly cheerful maker, Steven Brekelmans.

Difficult, too, to see connections between this artist’s earlier work—his life-size, balsa-wood sculpture of a drum kit, or his projected photo of ceramic vessels mounted on a turntable—and his new installation at the Or Gallery (on until October 24).

Flesh and Blood consists of large, black-and-white reproductions of Brekelmans’s ink drawings, mounted on foam insulation, backed with coloured panels, and installed on an open wooden structure. There are connections here, however, and they have to do with his interest in acquiring new skills, solving puzzles, and examining the values we place on the work of hobbyists.

Talking as he installs the show, Brekelmans says, “Looking back at my previous work, it is a jumble of weird things, but something that really does go through it is this idea of looking at some specific activity, be it whittling or balsa-wood airplanes or sign painting or, in this case, drawing cartoons. Really, just trying it out, trying to get good at it, finding….that tipping point where you stop fighting to learn it and you just suddenly become capable of doing it.”

Although Brekelmans’s exhibited work is primarily three-dimensional, he has always drawn as a form of thinking. A couple of years ago, he set himself the task of working in pen and ink in the style of New Yorker cartoons; the images, however, became increasingly dark.

“The drawings took me to this place of looking at alternative comix from the ’70s and ’80s, and also punk-rock posters and death-metal posters and these horrific black-and-white images,” he says. The work that evolved not only references the cheaply reproduced, DIY nature of such posters, but also demonstrates the ways in which underground expressions become absorbed into the mainstream.

Born and raised in Vancouver, Brekelmans graduated from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1998. He then spent a decade working for a computer-game company, squeezing studio time into rare off-hours. In fact, he says, he liked his job so much that he had trouble limiting his commitment to it. “For me computer programming is pretty much the same as art-making—it’s a set of problems that you have to solve.”

A few years ago, however, he decided to create more space for art and enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Victoria. “Before I went back to school to do my master’s, my art practice sat in the time of my life that would traditionally have been devoted to hobbies,” he says. After having a child with his screenwriter wife, he rejigged his working schedule, spending two very concentrated days each week in the studio, acquiring new forms of expertise.

“Finding something difficult,” he says, “and finding something in that difficult activity that is then deposited in the work.”