Ever since the positive reception my rebar and concrete sculpture Fossil got at the Private Arts show opening in March, I've been on the lookout for more pieces like it. They're not very common so I wasn't expecting to find anything for a while, if ever. Imagine my excitement (yes, excitement) when I hit the jackpot not once but TWICE this past weekend.
The first came on Saturday at Lake Fairfax Park near our house in Reston. After dropping my son off for his fishing class, I went for a hike around the park and found a baby turtle, an entire deer skeleton, and a juicy piece of rebar and concrete just lying in the woods near a gravel road. I showed the turtle to my son and we relocated him to a safer spot, decided to pass on the deer skull (still a bit meaty), but went back in the car to pick up the rust. Pretty productive for a drizzly Saturday afternoon.
On Sunday, we spent a nice afternoon at the Workhouse Arts Center (more on that later) in Lorton then headed north to DC for dinner at Comet Ping Pong. After some great pizza and ping pong with the family, we left for home, passing through the fancy-schmancy neighborhood of Chevy Chase. The road at that point was really narrow (three lanes squeezed into the space of two normal lanes) and the houses were huge so I was alternating between watching the cars next to us, marveling at the houses, and scanning the sides of the road for anything of interest.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the tell-tale shape of broken concrete with a speck of orange that usually means rebar and my pulse quickened. I turned right at the next street and got the expected "Dad, where are we going?" from the back seats. I could feel my wife Susan's eyes rolling in her head when I said that I had "spotted something." Thankfully, there were no further questions as I pulled over, jumped out of the car, and lugged my heavy prize back to the car.
One of the best parts about this "art" that I do is the unexpected finds that happen every day. You never know when you're going to stumble across something really great and it makes every car ride or walk around the neighborhood a treasure hunt.
Okay, it's time to move on to actively "drawing" the work! Using the "readymade" as is has been eloquently done by Duchamp and many others, forming a roadblock to one's originality. Find the rusted rebar and start pouring your own concrete forms into a dirty, muddy, gravelly hole in your back yard. All sorts of impressions and other rusted objects can then be part of the process of partially embedding the drying glob. The same hole can be used over and over so that it doesn't turn into a divorce issue. Or you can disguise the hole by doing a raised compost box, which just happens to have your stuff in it. Just today, I pulled up several pieces of rusted rebar while picking up trash around Lorton Arts Foundation. Did I mention that I'm a PT handyman there? Lots of broken concrete and rebar, but not always together. Happy hunting!\
ReplyDelete--Robin