THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 12, 1996 TAG: 9604120061
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Teresa Annas, Staff Writer
LENGTH: Short : 50 lines
TWO MONTHS AGO, Todd Moy found himself in a steel junkyard in Chesapeake, digging with bare hands into giant piles of industrial castoffs.
``It was something out of T. S. Eliot's `The Wasteland,'' said the Western Branch senior. ``Completely barren. Rust was bombarding the whole area.''
Todd - a Student Gallery finalist and winner of the Dumbfabulous award given by Dumbwaiter restaurateur Sydney Meers - had come with a Governor's School art class to scout for metal bits from which to weld sculptures.
``Basically, you'd see sheets of metal, and piping. That didn't interest me that much. I was more interested in the objects that were like artifacts.''
By artifacts, he means ``originality. Being completely different from the other things. So I found these weird shapes.''
He looked for objects that ``would spark something inside me.''
Todd bought 10 odd pieces. Then he took them to the sculpture studio at Old Dominion University, and kept arranging and rearranging them. He got this idea ``to work on something about the processes of the brain.''
The top part of his sculpture, with its gears and camshaft, relates to the brain's functions, he said.
Four metal rods hang from that top section, with small glass bottles attached to the rods. To Todd, it's as though the thought processes got funneled into those rods and emptied into the clear bottles, which symbolize ``the different masks we put on for other people.''
Todd, 17, believes people are not in touch with their true emotions most of the time, ``because of the way society dictates our lives.''
At the base of his piece, called ``Emotional Alchemy,'' Todd has attached a handmade book. The book is open, and holes have been cut into the pages in the shapes of objects stored there - a spoon, a padlock and a ratchet adaptor.
``People used to hide valuables in books,'' he explained, ``by cutting into the pages.'' The ``valuables'' he placed there have symbolic meanings for Todd: The spoon represents life, and the padlock represents how we hide our feelings. And the adaptor? ``Acceptance into society.''
``People need to see how they're affected by society, and its regular standards,'' he said. ``Not everybody should have to live by them.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
[student art]<
by CNB