Driver Steve Carney looks for the artist’s signature on the stainless steel surface of the 67-foot piece of art.
An artist pulls up a grown apple tree by its roots and sends it off to a forge to be bronzed.
Steve Carney, a driver for Jeff Dagen Trucking in New York, hauled that bronzed tree from the Tallix Foundry in Beacon, N.Y. back to its original home amidst other apple trees. “I don’t know if it’s art,” Carney says, “But it must have been expensive.”
Especially when you add the ceramic apples and the leaves made by the French artist and imported to make the tree look just right. “I took that apple tree back and they put it back in the same place, except they moved it four feet away from the rest of the row. And that’s what made it art, they said,” says Carney.
Tallix does a lot of work with artists, and Carney is here again on a Friday in early September to load a sculpture headed for the new National Air and Space Museum at Dulles Airport in Virginia, just 25 miles west of Washington, D.C. Created by John Safer, a sculptor with many large pieces to his credit, it is a 67-foot tall, 9,000-pound creation made of polished stainless steel.
At its base it is more than 11 and a half feet wide, and it spirals toward its top, becoming slimmer as it twists toward the final thickness of a needle. It has been fabricated in two pieces, each about 35 feet long, to facilitate transportation. At its break about halfway up is a jagged line fitted with stainless steel nipples, which will fit into holes on the other piece to hold it in place when it is erected. After it is positioned, the seam will be welded, ground and polished to provide those who see it with the unblemished illusion of a single continuous piece of steel that soars weightlessly skyward, like flight itself. Called “Ascent” by the artist, the nearly hollow steel construction is meant to capture the human experience of flight.
Safer says he designed this piece so that it could be transported and erected. “I started with a vision and worked backwards so that it could be transported to the museum and set so that when it is up people can see the flow of it.” Ascent is actually made of a number of sections welded together. “The base is made in sections, but the top piece is hollow,” the artist says. The highly polished skin is 1/2-inch stainless reinforced with an internal hatchwork of steel beams.
