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Focus on Four

 Still time to see creations from "Art on Wheels'
By ROB LYNCH
Buffalo News Contributing Reviewer
9/5/2003

"Art on Wheels," the summerlong public art project, is running into its final weeks.

As a prelude to the big Oct. 21 auction - to be held in Rockwell Auditorium on the Buffalo State College campus - a selection of art cars and wheel-related sculptures will be arrayed Oct. 18 and 19 along Bidwell Parkway in a special event called "Wheel-O-Rama."

Sponsored by the Burchfield-Penney Art Center and the Materials for Reuse Project, "Art on Wheels" has been a well-orchestrated, high-profile event that has stationed sculptures and cars at 57 historic and cultural sites within Buffalo Niagara.

However, when art collides with the kind of marketing dazzle essential to public projects of this sort, aesthetics can sometimes become skewed by a shower of high expectations and hype.

As this very visible public project comes to a close, the question is: Are these sculptures and cars all they are cracked up to be? Do they function as good contemporary art?

Thankfully, many do. What follows is an assessment of four projects selected from many possible candidates.

A standout is William Howe and William Cannings' "Pierce Arrow Horizon," an altered Plymouth Horizon named after Buffalo's old Pierce Arrow building, where it was executed.

Located at the Castellani Art Museum and sponsored by Niagara University, the car sits on a pedestal at the museum's front entrance, its body panels thrown upward like the lift of Marilyn Monroe's dress over that famous subway grate.

The car's hood, doors and quarter panels have been cut away, reversed and remounted on the roof of the car in a mirror-image of the skeletal remains below.

The innards of the doors, now exposed, offer unsettling views into the secret workings of the thing that many of us drive around daily, dumbly unaware of what makes it work.

Howe and Cannings expose the car's rusty parts the way a medical dissector exposes flesh, bones and sinews. Looking at the skeleton of the once-cute Horizon now gives one an unsteady feeling, a sense of danger.

Near the Castellani Museum is the Niagara Power Project Power Vista, the site of Robert Dray and Stephen Saracino's elaborate kinetic sculpture "Trazow" (sponsored by New York Power Authority).

These two Buffalo State College professors have made a beautifully complex and flawlessly constructed machine that looks like it might belong with its functional brothers churning out power within the plant.

Its memorable highlight is a disk of eight feet or so across that is covered in a thick black material with the wavy gird of cheesecloth. With some lines painted on the surface, some intersecting on floating clear plastic above and some casting shadows, it's a hypnotic image.

The gleaming surface of a swimming pool casting rippled reflections on the pool's floor comes to mind - as does the swirling surface of the Niagara River below. Depending on the angle of the rotating machinery, an
infinite number of variations sing out.

The large black disk is joined by a slightly smaller one in white that features a newspaperlike reproduction of two figures seen from behind.

Perhaps these figures are anonymous workers. But though anonymous, they add a note of humanity to the cold, fascinating mechanism that holds them.

At the entrance to the Visitors' Center in Niagara Falls State Park sits Isabelle Pelisser's "P.O.D." (sponsored by M & T Bank). It's a curious art car. Loosely coated in scrappy sheet metal and screws, this Toyota Cressida has a big Herman Munster-like clumsiness. It's a peculiar cross between a 70s body style and a battling ram.

The scuffed-up steel covering, already rusting with the mist of the falls only a few hundred feet away, seems a nod to Western New York's salt-encrusted winters.

After all of the metal work Pelisser has done, the car still wears a labor-intensive new armor that somehow doesn't seem to disguise much of the old armor. It feels a bit like a feeble masquerade party where everyone can guess who's who.

Still, the work attracts children and adults alike. They test its suspension, knock on its glass and behave with the skeptical "buyer beware" attitude of the used car lot. Perhaps they are on to something: The idea behind this transformation seems uneven and unfocused even after reading the artist's statement.

In Mark Taylor's "Bicycle Stick" (sponsored by First Niagara) standing tall at Gateway Harbor Park, the title tells all.

Old bicycles wrap themselves around a towering spindle, the whole thing shooting upward like a crazy steeple. The nest of wheels and frames makes it look like a gigantic, stretched-out and badly mangled pine cone.

The tower, about 40 feet tall, is impressive in scale. The bikes are of the thrift store kind, outgrown and worn-out. All have been painted quickly, with stripes, hearts or streaks of florescent spray-paint in gaudy day-glo colors. The various sizes and types of bikes, with their brake lines flopping and rusty bike chains dangling, bring visual variation to this immense stack.

With a little more than six weeks to go before the the "Art on Wheels" auction, the public still has time to get out to enjoy this delightful outdoor art project during the last days of summer and the first days of fall.

 

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