Up Close with Steelyard Artist Curtis Aric

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Thursday, April 14, 2011

Maggie Lange, GoLocalProv Contributor

Curtis Aric, who refurbishes what he calls “undesirable metals,” is a blacksmith at the Steelyard. He looks the part.  He has a thick woolen beard and a camel-yellow manly-looking apron.  His hands are black with soot or smoke as they handle this fragmented scrap-metal.  

He takes pieces from vintage cars, used bicycles, anything he has found dumpster diving, and makes sculptures out of his findings.  He fondly remembers using pieces from a red Camaro and a baby-blue Chevy.  Discovering people’s discards and turning them into art is his mission and he chats excitedly about some large metal pieces that he found behind a dumpster the other day.

Making flowers

After collecting metallic scraps, he turns everything into flowers.  He twists a dangerous looking red-rose in his hand.  It’s about life-size, but metal petals seem to have sharp edges.  This is nothing, he says.  Once, he made a flower out of razors.  “You had to be careful with that one,” he says.

Only two days before, Aric had been delivered a huge pile of broken TVs and computers that people had delivered to Goodwill’s recycling program.   He plans to go through the pile and transform the electronic junk into a bouquet of steam-punk roses. Then, he says, he will donate his art to Goodwill. People in the recycling world refer to Aric’s practices as ‘upcycling’—making something more valuable out of discarded pieces.

"Upcycling" motherboards

Right now, a pile of gorgeous, gleaming motherboards are in a box on one of the Steelyards work tables, waiting for Aric’s reinvention.  Removed from their context, they look beautiful and dangerous, like they might spark at any moment, like little fragments of physical electricity.

Aric confirms: “Be careful. That could zap you.”  He explains his knowledge of electronics comes from learning to work on cars.  He is familiar with systems and machines, he explained, and even had a job as a machinist. “But the order and the precision was too much for me,” so he turned to art.  “Now, if it looks right, it is right.” 

He explains the fun in working with this electronic equipment. “When I got those TVs, I was just looking forward to breaking them with a sledge-hammer,” Aric says, delighted at the conjunction of destruction and creation.

Exploiting the energy of electronics

Once he starts creating, the materials will influence the form of the pieces.  He points to a laser in one piece of the interlocking electronics, and explains his plan to make a flower with a functioning laser.  Part of the fun of working with electronics and art, he says, is exploiting the energy. 

In addition to flowers, he says that will branch out: “Maybe I’ll make some monsters.”  Fun monsters though.

“Do you have a minute?” he asks, “I’ll make you a quick monster.”  He begins dismantling an intensely coiled set of wires, and pulls off two legs, and then pulls a computer key from the pile, the “Scroll Lock” key, and makes a little body.  He picks up the springy plastic inside from a keyboard and drapes it over the newly-created creature: “Monster lingerie.”

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