Alec Von Bargen

Its Good To Be Back.

The generous people at Ondarte International Artist Residency have been good enough to invite me back for a second month, and have also provided tools and materials.  I think that almost counts as a grant.  (Should probably talk to someone about that, and scoop some resume cred.)

Ali Goodwin

This month

there are

strange types

here.

So it is back to stone and steel, my familiar ground.  I’ve been drilling and glueing steel rods into stones, then welding them into a single piece.  What piece, you ask?  Well I’m glad you did.

“A Good Egg”

Alec Von Barge

is the name of the work.  It will be a nine-foot

sphere.  A hybrid, with “exoskeletal” steel rods

holding up the lower half, and internal steel hosting the top.

The piece is intended as a gift from the Ondarte Residency to

the turtle population of Akumal.  Wish you had heard me trying

to explain how futile gestures are the most sacred ones at the

artists talk.  It was pretty much a futile gesture.

No, the turtles will not “get it”. But making the piece for them

will matter, in some magical land where futile gestures are

stored and counted and saved and treasured.

Alec Von Bargen

Jacks Cole

Work has been fun

and so far, wrinkle free,

as long as you don’t

count the wrinkles.

Progress as of a few days ago…

Ryan Walter Wagner

http://www.ondarteresidency.com/

On arrival, I was happy to find a beautiful facility, in the jungle, near a lagoon.

I spread out the tools, and did a few pieces right away, to get into the groove, and express a little.

Ondarte has a push-button espresso maker from “Intenso”.  This piece was a small tribute.

Then on a walk to the lagoon on day seven, I found some interesting sticks in the jungle.  I took

some back to the studio and things got more interesting.

Gathering sticks became a priority, then having friends gather sticks for me.  It was on.

I decided to use multiple sticks in a loose sphere.  I’ve never had much success at working small.

The work became seriously gratifying, and it was cold m and m’s and hot coffee for me.

“Turning Point” is a large piece I made recently.  I’m going through some major changes in my home life, and built this arch/gateway piece as an exploration of transition.

It took forever to build.

Taking it apart, and laying the columns down for transportation, scared the hell out of me.  They are seriously heavy.

At the gallery, it was time for a bigger piece of equipment.  My friend Todd has a logging truck which, with his hand, can place a piece to within an inch of the target.

Last minute adjustments with my old hockey stick.

photos by Sweeney Research  http://www.sweeneyresearch.com/

http://www.harborarts.net/au_team.html have landed some of the best real estate in town

for large scale outdoor sculpture.  Randi Hopkins at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art

presided over the jury for the show, and the work is directly across the bay from that revered

institution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Contemporary_Art,_Boston

It all started with a hoist.

Can I mention here that the gantry crane I built is the only one in existence with custom hardware and winches allowing it to hoist it’s own beam! Yeah, I said it, I invented that.  And if you are really into homespun custom fabrication, check out these two ramp rods above, which let the beam ride up to it’s platform without any help from below.  Doubtless way more than you want to know, but it lights up my evenings.

Self-hoisting gantry crane beam.

Once the piece was up, it was time to cut away the old foundation.  A careless crane maneuver on the last installation had all taken a toll on it.

The mighty Minx

Minx the cat was unimpressed throughout the proceedings, but that is her way.

At Boston Harbor

Unstrapping the rascal.

Mark the crane operator is a genius at the controls.  Below, you can see the spot where its usually

tough going.  This guy nailed it by going slow, and knowing his machine perfectly.  Love that!

Steve Israel, the generous and gifted sculptor behind Harbor Arts.  Steve not only brought in sculptors from three continents for this show, but he is using the shipyard and his considerable social capital to seed environmental awareness. Not a bad bone in his body.

Ball in Flight.

New home, with a view.

Phew!  Onto the next one… the Arch for Morgan Lehman Gallery.

Yesterday and today have found me in the studio, making an arch for Morgan Lehman Gallery,

and experiencing very briefly what is known in my tribe as “checkbook serenity”.  

I’d like to be a lot less dependent on cash and money flow, and am working toward that, but at present, this grant lands like a hot air balloon full of love.

Photo by Peninsula School of Art.

Josh Barash is a photographer with a particularly strong eye for capturing sculpture.  The City of West Hollywood Urban Art Program hired him recently to shoot the tree form I made for them last year.

I thought I would choose one or two images to post here, as I watch leaves sprouting everywhere here in New England.  It’s going to be tough to keep it down to two.

Sharn Ure and company at Katherine Spitz Associates

http://www.katherinespitzassociates.com/index_ksa_about.php

did an amazing job making this park into a distinct, beautiful environment.

I think the tree is happy there!  I love how this image captures the lines.  I hope some pedestrians stop, lay down, and grok this.  Might be a bit much to ask.

This amazingly intricate array of welded bronze can almost vanish, depending on where you stand as you look.

Seen from up close in a field of sky, you could never miss it.

I think it works.

Many thanks to:

Beatrix Barker, Art Advisor

The City of West Hollywood.

Andrew Campbell, cultural affairs administrator

Sharn Ure, KSA Landscape Architecture

Samantha Saliter, installation Goddess

By Kathryn Boughton

SALISBURY—“Art is completely the water I swim in,” said Cornwall artist and performer Karl Saliter, addressing a roomful of Salisbury School students last Thursday.”Artists see challenges and opportunities.”

Mr. Saliter had been invited to the school to describe his work and to explain his process for finding inspiration and carrying it through to completion. High-spirited, funny, and relying on the body language he uses so effectively in his alternate career as a clown, Mr. Saliter engaged his audience as he flashed through a Power Point program that showed many of his pieces and the work that went into their creation.

Up came an image of a wire mesh tree that he installed in West Hollywood. “I made the tree and sold it to West Hollywood, and for a while I was in danger of being happy,” he quipped to his audience. “But no sculptor can make trees as well as nature.”

It is ironic that this tree brought him such joy, because, as his blurb onperformers.net says, “Karl, who left a perfectly good career as a tree doctor in Arizona to take up street performing, now lives in Connecticut surrounded by trees he ignores.” Still, Mr. Saliter looks to nature for many of the materials he incorporates in his sculptures. He is noted for combining stones and steel to create innovative abstract forms.

Asked how he stumbled on the combination of stone and metal, he responded that his first foray into sculpture came during the promotion to a “no TV” week in Cornwall. He crafted an anti-television sculpture using a satellite dish as a base that was placed by the school door. He said the sculpture launched his career as an artist “to no acclaim at all.”

“After that, I just worked in metal,” he continued, “but I didn’t do anything I felt happy to get behind. Then I was on a walk in the woods, not even thinking about art, when I saw a rock. I had no idea what I would do with it, but I loved that rock because it was perfectly, perfectly flat on one side. Today, I think I would find it boring, but I picked it up and brought it back with me.”

His impulsive behavior is part and parcel of his approach to art. “We live as if we are not a naturally occurring phenomenon,” he said. “If we understand that, it takes the pressure off you. My work is process oriented—I don’t know which direction I am growing in, but I try to keep actively a part of my work. The two things I cultivate in my mind are gratitude and wonder.”

From that moment in the woods grew a body of work that has seen him drill into stones he gathers and arrange them in compositions held together by rebar. His early constructions often featured smooth stones anchored by epoxy atop rebar poles, arranged at different angles and heights. Now he is attracted by rougher stones, with sharper angles that he incorporates into structures. The new materials have led to heavier constructions, such as a stone cube he made last summer at the Peninsula School of Art in Fish Creek, Wisc.

He had been invited to the school for a two-week residency and said he had no idea what he would create once there. “I worked entirely from found materials I took from campus,” he reported. “It was a great time.”

Particularly exciting to the artist was the new-found opportunity to use heavy equipment to help him move the parts of his sculpture. “When they hired me, I said it would be nice if they could have a Bobcat available for me,” he said, “and they said yes. I thought they would provide an operator, but when I got there, they said, ‘Here’s the keys.’ Yes! God, I love a Bobcat! What a change in your work when you have something like that.”

The addition of the equipment ended up changing the final appearance of the sculpture, however. “I could weld a whole wall together and then move it,” he told the Salisbury students. “It was so great to be able to create something and then move it, but it warped when I picked it up, which gave the final work subtle bows and curves that make the cube much more organic.”

Most of the stones are used in the state he finds them, rarely reworked to make them fit in the composition. Placing the elements is “meditative and good,” he told the students, but while creation of the piece is rewarding, he is not wedded to the final product. “I can remove rocks and welds,” he explained. “Sometimes I take things down and reprocess them. I am not concerned with rust prevention.”

He noted that most public art is removed within 60 years of its installation as tastes change.Some of his creations seem to fly in the face of probability. Consider the stone and metal sphere that seems to float on the surface of the Hudson River, installed in 2008. “At that point the river is about chest high,” he explained. “I took a six-by-three-foot steel grate—it was originally part of a trash can I created for a Great Barrington [Mass.] public art display that was rejected—and I sank it in the river to support the sphere.”

With all his work, Mr. Saliter said he likes his viewers to have a physical connection. “If I could, I would make a sign that says, ‘Please touch the art,’” he told his audience.

He was asked how he determines when one of his free-form sculptures is done. “There are moments that are really beautiful on the way, but I really know that it is not done,” he said. “Then there are just definitive moments, when you think, ‘After this, I’m gilding the lily.’”

Which brought his audience to the question of whether he does drawings of his sculptures before he starts to work. “Yeah, but there are very few people I let see them. They are horrible,” he responded. “I take them to a technical drawer and then I try to make the sculpture come up to the original concept.”

http://countytimes.com/articles/2010/04/09/news/northwest_corner_journal/doc4bbdf447ea66a857738623.txt

Photo by Peninsula School of Art.

This Spring, in celebration of Earth Day, the Peninsula School of Art will be planting a tree inside this cube form.  I’m very excited to see it grow through!

This is getting to be habit forming.  I’m starting a third one today.