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Beautiful
Behemoths
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| By:
Susan Van Dongen, TimeOFF |
06/23/2005 | |
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California
Girl Kate Graves finds a way to save Trenton's architectural
past through sculpture.
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California girl Kate Graves finds
a way to save Trenton's architectural past through
sculpture.
| Kate Graves grew
up in Santa Barbara, Calif., a kind of fantasy land to
Easterners annoyed with blight, overcrowding and bad
attitudes. In fact, she says there was virtually no urban
decay there because everything is
new.
"It's literally the 'land of the
lotus eaters,'" she says. "In Santa Barbara, everything is
beautiful, everyone is happy — and I couldn't stand it. I had
to get out. So I moved to the rust belt. And I just love
it."
She can't get enough of
salt-of-the-earth Eastern cities like Newark and, especially,
Trenton, where she settled in the
'90s.
"I love living and working here,"
says Ms. Graves, who lives just across the river in
Morrisville, Pa. "It's not that Trenton is ever going to be
this slick new place, but we have way more than we give
ourselves credit for."
One thing
Trenton has is Gallery 125, which celebrated its first
birthday June 10, launching the group show 365 Days Later.
(It runs through Aug. 5.) Ms. Graves' cast bronze
sculpture, "Hamilton Ave.," is an integral part of the show:
The subject matter is an old Victorian home that still stands
on Hamilton Avenue in Trenton. Along with painter Eric Fowler,
she'll give a gallery talk June 29.
"My
houses are recreated verbatim," Ms. Graves says. "This is
exactly what they looked like. I spent quite a bit of time
photographing them and then I drew them on brown paper. Then I
(transferred the drawings) on cast wax sheets and fit the wax.
I cast all these elements flat and separately and then I put
them together in metal and welded them together."
The result is
a meticulous rendition of the 19th-century house. Ms. Graves
has taken special care to recreate the various textures of the
exterior surfaces, down to the most minute details, such as
tiling and trim. The original owners of the Hamilton Avenue
structure probably employed a host of skilled carpenters,
tilers and masons to custom-build their home, prized in its
time but now in irreversible
disrepair.
Trenton was filled with such
mansions at one time. Around the turn of the 20th century, the
dwellings were home to families made prosperous by the
pottery, rubber and steel industries.
Industry was
foundering even before the Great Depression, though, and
Trenton's golden age faded. Not even the nationwide boom after
World War II could bring the state capital back to the good
times. Lack of financial resources and civic motivation
allowed the ornate Victorian structures to decline. Then
riots, fires and other upheavals of the '60s sped many of
these mansions to their ruin.
All of this
struck Ms. Graves, who first noticed the old houses when she
rode her bicycle around the city. She imagined a photo essay
to document the structures' crumbling elegance, but then
decided to cast them in bronze
instead.
"Hamilton Ave." is one in a
series of five sculptures titled Zero Tolerance Area,
which Ms. Graves began working on in 2000. The sculptures are
scaled-down portraits meant to evoke the buildings' social
history. Once grand and filled with life, these houses are now
abandoned and boarded up to discourage illegal activity. Ms.
Graves was struck by the way they became invisible — people
just didn't seem to see these once-beautiful behemoths, and
they certainly didn't care enough to try and restore
them.
"I thought about absence, about
what is missing from these houses — and that's human beings
willing to do the work to maintain the quality and the beauty
of these structures," says Ms. Graves, who purchased a
100-year-old home in Morrisville and is redoing it herself. "I
can see why people don't want to do it. It's a
battle."
"I sought a way to explore the
theme of absence," she writes in her artist's statement. "I
wondered how a productive, integrated city had fallen to the
burned-out brick and mortar husks of today. I began to devise
a plan to create the houses, including overgrowth and boarded
up windows. The sculptures were created as a reminder that,
without maintenance and vigilance, even the most noble
countenances will sag and fall to
dust."
Ms. Graves has a bachelor's degree
in Asian art history from Mills College in Oakland, Calif.,
and studied for a semester in Nepal and Tibet with the School
for International Training's Tibetan Studies Program. In 1995,
she enrolled in an apprenticeship program at the Johnson
Atelier Technical Institute of Sculpture in Mercerville, and
was hired as a staff member in the foundry department in 1998.
In September 2002, Ms. Graves was named purchasing director
for the school. She was laid off when the school closed last
year, along with the foundry.
Ms. Graves
says she has transitioned into painting, which seems natural
since her mother and grandmother were both painters. She
already has a show slated for September in Trenton's Gallery
at Lafayette.
"I'd been taking classes in
portrait painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in
Philadelphia, trying to move out of sculpture because I knew I
wasn't going to be able to cast bronze indefinitely," she
says. "I was trying to find other modes of expression and I
had been painting as a hobby. So now I have a goal to work
towards, with the show in September."
She
praises the cooperative spirit of Gallery 125, which has
become a focal point of a revitalized cultural scene in
Trenton.
"It's a really an important
aspect of the community," Ms. Graves says. "It brings so many
groups of people together, not just the crowd from the
Atelier, or the Trenton City Museum, or Princeton, but all
kinds of different people. It's very democratic, with the open
call for exhibits. And people buy work here, too. I had four
pieces in the winter show and sold
three."
Since Ms. Graves' began the
Zero Tolerance Area project, three of the properties
have been demolished, one is being renovated and the other is
in negotiations for renovation. In early June, two pieces from
the project, "Greenwood Ave." and "East State St. #2," were
permanently installed at Station Plaza, across from the
Trenton Train Station. The other two, "Roebling" and "East
State St. #1," are part of an ongoing installation at the
State University of New York at
Fredonia.
"When I first started the
project the message (of the homes) wasn't good," she says.
"Now they're gone and I wonder, is that better or worse? Three
of the homes are vacant lots now. These 'creatures' that were
in a stasis for all these years have left. So, my sculptures
are three-dimensional snapshots of a moment in time that has
now passed.
"Something will come along,
though, and that is the nature of the city," she continues.
"These are not nostalgic pieces. I'm not looking for a past to
return. But I'm appreciative and respectful of the past and
hopeful for the future."
Kate Graves' sculpture is
part of the group show 365 Days Later at Gallery 125,
125 S. Warren St., Trenton, through Aug. 5. Ms. Graves and
painter Eric Fowler will give a gallery talk, June 29, 12:30-1
p.m. Gallery talks are scheduled every Wednesday at 12:30 p.m.
Gallery hours: Tues.-Fri., noon-6 p.m., Sat., 11 a.m.-4 p.m.
For information, call (609) 989-9119. On the Web: www.gallery125.com
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| ©PACKETONLINE News
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