Local artist's work appears in multi-million dollar Hollywood film (4 photos)

Local artist Chris Shoust says he often gets emails from scam artists contacting him through his website.

So, when he got an email from a Hollywood set decorator claiming to represent six-time Oscar nominee director M. Night Shyamalan, he thought it was just another one of those.

It wasn’t.

Shoust’s artwork was recently used in acclaimed filmmaker’s 2016 movie Split, which just left the local movie theatre a couple months ago.

On a production budget of only $9 million, the movie grossed over $138 million according to Box Office Mojo.

The movie centres around a character that has 24 personalities — one of them the serial killer-like ‘Beast’ — and Shoust’s art can be seen lining the walls of the psychiatrist’s office, a prominent set in the film.

Two years ago, Shoust got the email from a Hollywood set dresser saying she saw his art online and that she wanted permission to use some of it in the movie Three Seconds.

He sent digital copies of his paintings, got paid, and then followed rumours about the movie's production online until he read something that said it was cancelled.

“I was like, ‘Oh man, what a drag,’ it would have been nice to see that in a movie,” he said.

Then, this spring, his mom texted him mid-flight while she was watching Split on the in-flight entertainment system.

"Uh, is one of your paintings in this film?" she asked Shoust, who had no idea what she was talking about.

Shoust’s fiancé, next to him at the time, started Googling images from the movie and saw what looked like his art in the background of some of the stills.

Shoust was dumbfounded but soon pieced together that the paintings he thought were going to be used in Three Seconds, wound up in Split.

Shoust said his work was chosen because his major theme for the past decade has been ‘mental health issues’.

Shoust started off as an artist at early age drawing hockey goalies, then MAD Magazine-type parody comics before eventually attending Algoma University in the Fine Arts Department while simultaneously taking English courses in 2006.

He said the stress from having to read multiple novels a week and having to churn out artwork at a pace he had never done before led to an event that changed his life and the direction of his work permanently.

“It was what they call a psychotic episode… where you can’t differentiate between reality and fiction anymore,” said Shoust. “The stress just got to me so much that something just went off in my brain and it was like… something igniting and firing off all the cylinders in my brain in every different direction to the point where I could not focus on anything. It’s so hard to explain in layman’s terms.”

Shoust describes it as not being able to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.

“Say I would be sitting… in a room and I’d be talking to (someone); I’d be questioning in my head every single thing that is going on. I’d be like, 'Am I really talking? Is this guy really here?'” said Shoust. “It involved everything. The phone would be ringing, and I’d be like, 'That phone isn’t ringing now'.”

Shoust said the episodes would come in several day cycles for weeks. Throughout the whole time, the stress of his school assignments didn’t let up.

“I was just working it out with my art. Trying to have this conversation with the canvas or the metal or the sculpture or whatever I was working with in order to sort of remind myself that everything is okay even though I’m going through this; I’m still functioning,” he said.

One of the art project series Shoust started while going to university and while being at the peak of his mental health issues was the ‘Frustration Series’ — a series of paintings that can be read in a sort of flowing sequence from one to the next and that share similar motifs and symbols.

Some of the paintings from this series made it into Split.

It’s perhaps significant that art and mental illness is running theme in the film and the main character himself is an artist.

Shoust said he is glad to have his work in the film but he is also slightly concerned that a film that portrays a person with a split personality as a serial killer might lead to stigmatization of those with mental health issues.

“But I’m still ecstatic they are in the movie. Of course I am,” said Shoust.

Shoust just wants to continue the conversation about mental health.

”Everyone has mental health issues, it doesn’t matter how acute they are. The average person deals with anxiety and depression. They don’t have to be a schizophrenic. I’m trying to reach out and to talk about all these different mental health issues with my work in order to just begin my discussion,” he said.