Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 7, 1992 TAG: 9202070103
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
ONE MAN'S TRASH IS THIS MAN'S CLAY
"This," says Adam Cohen, spreading wide his arms, "is heaven."It does not look like heaven. It looks like spiky piles of discarded steel. It looks like a junkyard.
It looks like Cycle Systems' scrap yard - that stretch of land in Roanoke wedged between U.S. 220 and Franklin Road. These are the mounds of metal that prompted the silly green paddles alongside the highway, that we might be spared the unseemly sight of our own waste.
This is Adam Cohen's heaven.
He sees things in these rusting bones that others may not.
He sees art.
Cohen, 29, is an architectural designer with a one-man business in downtown Roanoke because he has to be - it pays the bills. He is a sculptor who lives in Check, Floyd County, because he wants to be.
On Wednesday, he began assembling a sculpture of scrap, using the jagged pieces of steel that caught his fancy on the Cycle Systems stacks.
Commissioned by Cycle Systems to commemorate the company's 75th anniversary, Cohen's sculpture should be complete by late April. In the spirit of artistic privacy, the details of Cohen's work will not be divulged here. But scrap-yard owners don't commission sculptures made of granite. Cohen expects it to rise 30 feet. It likely will be visible from Wonju Street and from the expressway.
Cohen has sketched his vision and has a general notion of where he's headed, but it changes with each odd-shaped piece he finds jutting from a pile.
He began on Wednesday to build a base - a pair of large cylinders stacked on each other. Nobody can be quite sure, but the cylinders' previous life apparently was compressing grain into rabbit-chow pellets.
Cohen, with grease smeared on his dungarees and his sweat shirt, thick gloves on his hands and a hard hat on his head, found the cylinders on one of his junkyard cruises. He's like a crow, picking up the shrapnel that glints and catches his eye.
"Is this great, or what?" he bubbles, hefting a stainless steel plate with holes in it and some whatchamacallits dangling from the edges. "This is perfect."
It would seem oafish, boorish, unartistic, to say it looks like junk. Best to keep quiet and let Cohen's passion run on.
There are men and women at the scrap yard who roll their eyes and smile when Cohen's art is mentioned. But most are curious to see what will emerge from his gleanings.
Cycle Systems, as part of the commission, supplies Cohen with the welders, cranes and materials he needs.
The arc of a welder's torch cuts through some angle iron, cutting pieces to Cohen's specifications. Cohen lugged pieces of stainless steel through the scrap yard, skirting mounds of iron, stepping over gritty smears of oil, and dropped them in an open-faced shed that will be his studio.
No gentle dappling of sunlight. No skylights. No easels. As studios go, this concrete-floored outbuilding at Cycle Systems - with the forklifts rumbling around, and the welding, the highway traffic far up the bank - is a tad industrial.
But art is in the eye of the beholder.
This is Adam Cohen's heaven.