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• Clockwise: "Blurb (with colorblind palette)"

In his Vergennes studio, Ross Sheehan teaches art classes in a variety of mediums to children and adults. During the pandemic, he said, he began to offer classes outside — leading kids through downtown alleyways to find objects for making sculptures, for example. Aptly, in 2022, he dubbed his teaching enterprise the School of Psychogeographic Arts.

"Psychogeography" refers to the effect of a location — usually urban — on human behavior and emotions. "How do these places, spaces and environments we encounter in our everyday lives and routines make us feel?" Sheehan asks on his website. "What is the artist's response to place?"

Conversely, Sheehan's current exhibition at the South Burlington Public Library Art Wall isn't about this at all; rather, it's deeply personal, interior. He began making the prints and 3D constructions shown in "Defects and Other Objects" around 2016, he said, after a couple of years when a consuming job prevented him from making any art at all.

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• "Dormant Volcano Eye (with hand, horseshoe, lips, and teeth)"

"This body of work came out of that frustrating time," Sheehan said. "Instead of looking out into the world, I was looking inward and thinking, What are my defects?"

On the surface, his cartoonish visual expressions of self might seem pejorative, even hideous. The monotype "Dormant Volcano Eye (with hand, horseshoe, lips, and teeth)," for instance, depicts a blobby entity anthropomorphized with a buggy eye, protruding fingers and a mouth containing large, erratic teeth. In other works, the volcano is erupting. Sheehan's darkly humorous style might remind some viewers of the American cartoonist R. Crumb.

One of Sheehan's sculptures, formed from baked dough and painted with acrylic, is a misshapen foot with crossed toes. It's not clear how a smashed cellphone, its screen painted with wiggly rectangles, fits the theme, but it does indicate Sheehan's penchant for turning a useless item into an objet d'art.

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• "Foot (with crossed toes)"

One of the so-called "defects" that Sheehan's exhibit and artist's statement make public is color blindness. He acknowledged the seeming contradiction of being an artist who can't distinguish all the colors. "I had felt I couldn't reveal that," he said, "but I've been learning to let that come out. When I tell my kids, they are fascinated."

Sheehan enjoys bright colors, he said, but half-tones and secondary hues look the same to him. Primary colors appear in a few of his works at the library, including the mixed-media monotype "Self Portrait (with colorblind eyes, teeth, and fingerprints)" and the monotype "Fingerprinting (III, with colorblind palette)."

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• "Self Portrait (with colorblind eyes, teeth, and fingerprints)"

As those titles suggest, the exhibition isn't solely about perceived flaws. Sheehan also produced works based on that most individual of traits: the fingerprint. He began by inking his index finger and making an impression, then vastly enlarged and printed it in variations. The resulting monotypes are graphically striking, mazelike images; only the titles inform us that a swooping line across the whorls is a scar. (Sheehan obtained it in an unfortunate encounter with a nail on a board, he explained.)

After he returned to school in 2018 — earning an MFA in visual art at the Vermont College of Fine Arts — Sheehan's multifaceted work began to shift in other directions. So did his teaching. But he returned to the "defects" pieces because, he said, "I feel like there's more to do with this body of work."

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• "Untitled (crushed iPhone)"

For starters, Sheehan isn't entirely certain what it all means. The volcanoes are probably "symbolic of things that can happen at any time," he noted. But other recurrent imagery — horseshoes, power lines, torn dollar bills — is something he's still trying to figure out.

"The visual language I've created is a little mysterious, but I want to move forward, to tell a story like a comic book," Sheehan said. "I'm not sure where this is going to go, but some of these creatures are going to live in this other world. These pieces are like studies for work that is to come."

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• "Fingerprinting (II, map)"

Meantime, what does he hope viewers might take away from his current exhibition?

"To reexamine the word 'defect,'" Sheehan said. "To try to use [imperfections] as a catalyst, a catapult. I feel like I'm starting to do that. Take whatever comes your way and make something out of it."

"Defects and Other Objects" is on view through May 31.