Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 16, 1993 TAG: 9305160013
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A cow takes about 284 days; a chipmunk, 31.
But to make a stainless steel sculpture, from conception to delivery, will take Adam Cohen about 540 days altogether - assuming that the piece is ready by its June 5 unveiling.
In the first days of 1992, Cohen was commissioned by Cycle Systems to craft a sculpture using recycled materials.
Recycling is Cycle Systems' meat and potatoes, and the piece was intended as a tribute to the company's 75th birthday this year.
Cohen threw himself enthusiastically into the task. He selected stainless steel as his medium and he picked through Cycle Systems' sprawling salvage yards for materials.
In the late winter of '92, Cohen set to bending and welding. Hidden for hours at a stretch behind a welder's mask, he arced and sparked life into his creation.
He worked in a cavernous shed in the Cycle Systems yard, forklifts and cranes rumbling past, workers glancing suspiciously at the artist in their midst.
Cohen lives in Floyd County and practices architectural design in Roanoke.
A couple days each week, he would show up at Cycle Systems to weld and bend, bend and weld.
The stainless steel tribute was to be in place by April 1992 atop girders spanning Ore Branch, a sensationally appropriate name for the abused stream that trickles alongside the highway in a culvert, skirts the ferrous fields and then passes beneath the alternately dusty and muddy Cycle Systems yard.
There is nearly always an overturned shopping cart in Ore Branch, except for when there are two.
But building a sculpture over top of a rivulet, even a rivulet as wretched as Ore Branch, proved a delight to lawyers and no one else. Too many rules.
Instead, Cohen's masterpiece will be erected a hundred feet downstream, on a wedge of scrubby land that is a remnant from the long-ago construction of Wonju Street. It is bounded by Wonju, by Broadway Street and, of course, by Ore Branch.
Now the trees have been chopped down, there's a large concrete pad in place and a buried electrical line underneath it all. There's plumbing, too.
This recycled statue on recycled land will recycle water with a series of fountains.
Inside the Cycle Systems shed, a welder's arc sparks frantically as the daddy-longlegs base comes together.
Outside, a fine white plume rises over Cohen's masterpiece as workers sandblast the stainless steel.
Like love, sausage and legislation, it is best not to watch this piece of art being made. It's so . . . industrial.
Welders, electricians, plumbers, masons, loggers, bulldozer drivers and crane riggers are putting the finishing touches on Adam Cohen's statue, which he could call Wet Spaghetti in a Blender With Slurpee but probably will not.
Five hundred and forty or so days in the making, it will be. That's time enough to make two buffaloes.
by CNB