Sculpting The Future

Yes. It looks like a gas station, with its bleached light an d its orange-and-blue-striped canopy supported by great pillars sunk into ovals of cement. It looks so much like a gas station that drivers stop all the time along County Route 11 in Gallatin, NY, to ask Martine Kaczynski when she’ll open for business.

 

In a way, she already has, though there are no pumps and there is no gas.

That’s because Kaczynski is a sculptor. And this gas station is an idea. Not a place.

For Kaczynski, ideas are everything.

As a youngster she was astonished by a trek up Mount Etna in Sicily where the volcano side was so hot climbers wore special shoes, and paper dropped at their feet smoldered and burst into flame.

But at the rim of the crater, a string was the only barrier to the hellish fire below.

That’s when she first understood the power of an idea, like a frail cord holding people in place.

Now Kaczynski, 41, a Londoner by birth, a New Yorker by choice, is the first to take part in Greg and Sarah Lock’s resident artist’s program, which this sculptor and this painter call Rural Projects. The idea is to invite people like Kaczynski, established in their work, to their 30-acre stretch in Gallatin to make art that is, as Sarah Lock puts it, "ambitious in scale and content."

And ambitious this is. Kaczynski, a small, cheerful and powerful woman, has built this full-sized replica of an abandoned gas station (based on extensive study and her own very detailed plans) almost entirely herself. She mixed cement and built forms and constructed pillars and smoothed them with joint compound and sanded the surfaces smooth and put together the canopy with its asphalt roof and working drains. But when it came to hoisting the canopy aloft while screwing in the pillars, she got a hand from Christopher Werner, a student of hers at Pratt.

The location, she says, is perfect, the foundation of what used to be an old red barn close to the road. It speaks of the succession from agriculture, to a petroleum-fueled expansion, and to our now-uncertain future. Her gas station represents the relics to come, the places that will have to be abandoned or used for some new purpose.

This particular gas station can be a performance space, she says; and she plans, in time, to hook it up to solar panels that will power movie shows there. But that’s in the future. Right now she is working toward the grand opening on Oct. 6 — a big party, she says, with an opera singer and lots of friends and all the people who have stopped on Route 11 or asked her at the grocery store, when will the gas station open?

 

 

style="font-size: 10pt"like a gas station, with its bleached light an d its orange-and-blue-striped canopy supported by great pillars sunk into ovals of cement. it looks so much like a gas station that drivers stop all the time along county route 11 in gallatin, ny, to ask martine kaczynski when she’ll open for business. >

The opening reception is this Saturday, Oct. 6, from 4 to 8 p.m., in Gallatin, NY, 650 County Route 11, just north of the intersection with Decker Road. For information, go to www.ruralprojects.org or call 518-851-7528.