"Some of the artists are trained artists, and a lot have come into the field from working with materials they fell in love with," explained Eileen Heckerling, the show's curator.
Bill Cypher, 46, a plumber from Washingtonville, New York, a town of 6,000 about 105km from here, submitted a pirate ship whose steering wheel is a brass faucet, for display behind velvet ropes at the Stamford mall. "Most everything on that ship is from an electrical thing like a light fixture or a plumbing-related object," Cypher said.
Steve Heller, 62, who made the rocket ship sculptures, had put in many years as an auto mechanic. But ever since a childhood visit to the Museum of Modern Art, where he saw a baboon head that Picasso had fashioned from two toy cars, he said, "I knew I, too, could be an artist."
He is used to the odd stares he gets from neighbors in Boiceville, New York, a tiny Ulster County town near Woodstock, when he drags infected maple trees home, so he can take advantage of the wild-looking streaks in the blond wood, or loads up on old barn siding. "I save everything," he said. "If I didn't make stuff out of it, it would have been in the crusher, or it would have ended up in a Toyota."
Richard Benash, 53, a scrap yard dealer in Yonkers, New York, who does a lot of demolition work, completed three large sculptures for the show in less than four weeks. "I just go," he said, describing the process. "I lay the sheet of steel on my design table, and I just take a piece of chalk and draw my design, and then I cut it out."
His work has a cartoonish feel to it - in part, he said, to appeal to children. To make whimsical lettering, he uses an air-pressured plasma cutter.
One Benash on view is a funky taxi that has been parked on a stretch of Summer Street, as if awaiting a fare. The wooden wheels came off a 1915 Buick, Benash said. The taxi is the only piece in the collection that viewers can experience from the inside. "Wish I knew it was next to a automotive glass shop," said Benash of the taxi's placement. "I would have put a broken window on it."
He also contributed a loopy sign that says Main Street and sits, appropriately, on Main Street, just outside Stamford's old town hall.
After teaching leather crafts to fellow servicemen in the Army in the 1970s, Benash said, he began experimenting with metal after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Friends who had helped with the downtown rescue effort in New York were making steel crosses from some of the found metal to honor the dead, and he was inspired.
Because of his day job, costs are minimal. "For the average artist, it's expensive to buy steel," he noted. "It's not expensive for me. I handle hundreds of thousands of pounds of metal a week."
He said some of his larger sculptures had fetched as much as US$20,000 and US$30,000, but he is not giving up his first career, yet. "I couldn't, because you don't sell art every day," he said. "To be honest with you, the scrap business is very hot right now, and I'm very busy."
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