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| Watch Ms. Wayne's News-spot: |
| Channel 2 KDKA, Pittsburgh Nightly News |
| Feature October 2004 |
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December
19, 2002 in front of FDNY Engine House 55
on Wall Street |
| Holly
Wayne was concerned that after 9/11,
people might be upset by her work depicting
the World Trade Center. Wanting to find out
what others thought, she took NEW YORK
98.6 to the people who would likely
be the most offended in order to gauge
their impressions--the FDNY on Wall Street.
The Firemen loved it and encouraged
her to display it publicly. |
| Ms.
Wayne has created a remarkable miniaturized image from artifacts that memorializes
those who passed away in the terrorist attack that demolished the WTC buildings.
All of the artifacts used to create this work of art were collected before
9/11, and now serve as a connection to both worlds past and present. NEW
YORK 98.6 is a fine tribute to the industries and people of a bygone
era. |
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| She also put the piece on an easel on
the Avenue of the Americas to get the opinions of the people walking
by and, as you can see from everyone's reaction (including Regis), they also
loved it. |
Top
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Magazine Articles
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PITTSBURGH Magazine, Holly Wayne feature, October 98
VM & SD Magazine, Bloomindgale's Metalar(TM) Floor
Metalar Table
VM & SD Magazine, NADI Show (Nat' l Assoc Display Industry)
Red Metalar(TM) Walls, Jacob Javitz Center, NYC 1989
RETAIL ATTRACTION Magazine, UK - NADI Show
Metalar(TM) Walls & Screen, Jacob Javitz Center, NYC 1989
(RETRAIL ATTRACTION Magazine, UK, Holly Wayne walls and screen)
VM & SD Magazine, Handmade Metalar(TM) Resin
VM & SD Magazine, Temple Sinai, Pittsburgh, PA - decorative lit Metalar(TM) panels
VM & SD Magazine, Figali Panama, Metalar(TM) Wall
SAG HARBOR EXPRESS Newspaper, Holly Wayne sculptures, Honorable Mention
VM & SD Magazine, Metalar(TM) Walls & Screen
VM & SD Magazine Feature, Metalar(TM) Fixtures, Accente - Scottsdale, AZ
RETAIL STORE IMAGE, UK, Feature, Accente - Scottsdale, AZ
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News Article
Holly
Wayne's World: Reinventing
Railroad Art
by David
Garlan |
Sitting
in her Pittsburgh studio,
Holly Wayne stares at a 1940's
front-on picture of the N&W
Y6 Number 2197 steam locomotive.
Crowded around her on all
sides are pieces of old machinery,
antique kitchen tools, disassembled
motors -- the tools of her
trade.
Holly Wayne is an artist. Her vision is to capture the grandeur of the industrial
past. To do this she creates three dimensional pictures of settings inspired
by memories and old photographs of America's industrial heritage: steel mills,
chemical factories, city skylines, barges, and railroads. Art portraying industrial
scenes is hardly new, but what makes her work unique is the way she creates these
pictures. Scenes are built up by assembling ordinary objects. A chair leg becomes
a chemical smoke stack, a caulking gun becomes a furnace, a refrigerator coil
becomes a cooling tower, battery terminals become windows, a thermometer becomes
a radio tower, a cake pan becomes a building.
Using old artifacts is not the whole story. To make the picture come alive and
provide cohesion between the parts, she embeds the pieces in a special substrate
that she invented, called MetalarTM. MetalarTM is a resin-based,
metallic substance that glimmers in the light, and provides a luminescent backdrop
for the scene. It can be fashioned in many colors to fill in expanses of sky
and water, lending the picture an added dimension. It makes one feel like it
is possible to see through the surface of the picture.
The combination of MetalarTM with old mechanical artifacts allows
her pictures to work on two levels. On one level the picture can be viewed as
an assemblage in which the parts contribute to the overall scene or image. On
another level the embedded parts themselves become objects of interest.
For example, in "Nova at Dusk" the overall picture
is of an operating chemical plant, but when viewed at close-range, the constituent
objects in the picture appear as interesting historical entities in their own
right. This picture,for example, uses cheese graters, double popsicle molds,
a toilet float, tube cutters, refrigerator backing, gun cleaner parts, oil filters,
and watch parts, among the myriad objects embedded in the picture. Other pictures
are more abstract, such as "Industrial
Ice Cubes." Right now she is working on a railroad piece. Railroads,
a favorite theme in her work, have appeared in many of her art pieces, such as "Eastbound." "Growing
up in Pittsburgh I used to watch trains crossing nearby trestles and bridges.
I used to wonder where they were going, and imagined hopping on one. For me,
they were an integral part of living in Western Pennsylvania."
Ms. Wayne’s fascination with such industrial images stems from her early
experiences as a child growing up in Pittsburgh. Her father was a steamfitter
and operating engineer who ran machinery like cranes, high lifts, bulldozers,
and a Pettibone handler. He helped build steel mills, bridges, and power plants,
and used to take her to see where he worked, pointing out the role he played
and talking about how it all was constructed. Later in life these experiences
would come back to inspire her art.
The artwork is often large. A typical picture will be 4 feet by 6 feet, and can
weigh up to 250 pounds, although the train pieces tend to be smaller. Pictures
are usually housed in elaborate frames, often done in a classical museum-quality
shadow box, which she designs independently for each piece. She says, “I
sometimes combine up to 6 different kinds of moldings to make a single frame.
The sophistication of the frames contrasts with the simplicity of the parts,
setting off the pieces, and helping to raise the mundane to the level of high
art. A good example of a railroad piece is "Gallitzen
Tunnel," which depicts a head-on view of a 1916 vintage Norfolk and
Western Railroad steam locomotive emerging from a tunnel. The picture is consists
of about 50 artifacts. For example, the circular boiler is formed from a housing
for an alternator, miner's number tags, a light bulb, a large nut, and a wheel
bearing; the bell is made from a pressure relief valve; the bridge from a fire
grate and a bicycle chain; the ladders from an assembly line chain.
Holly Wayne Productions is the firm that she founded and runs out of Mckees Rocks,
Pennsylvania. Its primary clients are large corporations who typically place
her pictures in boardrooms, corporate lobbies, and CEO offices. Her larger pieces
sell for as much as $85,000, with train pieces selling for around $35,000. Often
her work is commissioned. For example, the picture "Nova at Dusk" is
a recreation of a Chemical Factory for Nova Chemicals, a large firm headquartered
south of Pittsburgh. Other past clients include Bloomingdale's in New York City,
Chrysler Corporation in Detroit, Westinghouse and MotivePower Industries of Pittsburgh.
A number of projects
are currently in progress. One is a tribute to New York City, which she started
in 2000. She plans to do a series: one of her completed works, the
2nd in the series, features the Twin Towers set in its skyline. The
piece will eventually find its home in New York and is to be featured in an upcoming
installment of The Weekend Today in New York (NBC) television show, as well as
Life Around Here (ABC). Another project that she is contemplating is a museum
exhibition featuring scenes of Western Pennsylvania. She plans on creating a
dozen vignettes, each devoted to a different facet of industrial life in Southwestern
Pennsylvania. These vignettes will be accompanied by a book, written by authorities
in the field of industrial history and culture, which will provide a photographic
and narrative interpretation. A professionally commissioned audio piece will
document the sounds associated with each vignette and serve as a self-guide through
the exhibit.
The challenge in producing these pictures is to find the right pieces. In order
to have a sufficient pool of artifacts, Ms. Wayne spends most of her weekends
visiting flea markets, antique stores, and scrap yards. Her factory houses all
of the things that she acquires, storing them in various shelves, cases, boxes
and tabletops. To the untrained eye, the place looks like a junkyard; to Holly
Wayne it represents the discarded past waiting to come alive again.
Educated at Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York City, Holly Wayne started
out as an interior designer. For many years she worked in that field, discovering
art later in life. Her first foray was as a commercial artist creating resin
panels using her newly invented MetalarTM. These were featured as display floors,
walls, and backdrops in places like Bloomingdale’s and the Detroit Chrysler
Auto Show. Later she started creating composite works. "What drew me to
three-dimensional pictures was an interest in reclaiming objects of the past
as art. I found myself collecting old broken metal things, like motor parts,
without knowing exactly what I wanted to do with them. At some point I realized
that I wanted to assemble them into pictures." Her first realism piece of
this sort was constructed with her father. It was a relatively simple picture
of a steel mill and skyline that attracted enough attention to be covered on
the Pittsburgh evening news television broadcast. Later as she developed into
an established outsider artist, the pictures would become larger and more complex,
often involving hundreds of parts.
"Creating the pictures is difficult because I have to work horizontally
on a flat surface. This makes it hard to know how the picture is going to look
when it hangs vertically, and from a distance. I often have to stand on a ladder
and lean over a piece to get a sense of its overall composition."
Returning to the piece at hand, she notices that something is missing: the cowcatcher
at the bottom of the locomotive. She thinks hard for a moment and recalls having
bought a roller bearing cover in a flea market some years ago. "Now where
is it? Ah yes…", rummaging through shelves of such artifacts she
finds what she was looking for, lays it in place. "Perfect."
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| Thursday,
September 28, 2006 |
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Local
Artist
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There
is a very impressive
local artist you may
want to check out online
if you have a few extra
seconds.
Her name is Holly Wayne. I recently ran into Holly at an event at Nemacolin Woodlands
resort. She was showing the piece you see here. Isn't it wonderful? It's even
better in person. Holly grew up in Pittsburgh and I think it translates into
her art. Her site is www.hollywayne.com |
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Her
pieces are industrial
and beautiful and interesting
and modern and sentimental
and as you can tell I
love it. She says the
steel mills of her childhood
inspired many of her
pieces. That's clear.
I think that's why I
like her stuff so much
is because it is Pittsburgh.
Holly told me, "We all need to remember our past, because it has made
us who we are. Cultures preserve their history and teach their lessons
to their young through stories. Once the stories are lost, they’re
lost forever. The same is true for our artifacts. I think that artists
are today's storytellers.
"I
am drawn to the spirit
of America's past
and I want to preserve
a sense of what was.
Many industries are
represented in my work
through artifacts and
discarded found objects.
"I want us to remember
what it was that made our
country great. Although
I do create modern pieces,
much of my art reflects
America's industrial
past. It
becomes a kind of snapshot
of that era, integrating
in a three-dimensional
way, scenes that
are interesting to look
at and historically significant.
"In 1999, I felt the need to create a New York skyline piece and I began
collecting materials. Then, when the tragedy struck on 9/11, like many
Americans, I was compelled to visit Ground Zero. For most of us, these
visits were a pilgrimage. I think we all needed to make some sense out
of what had happened. |
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"During
a recent trip to New
York, I became concerned
that the original setting
of the World Trade Center
would be lost by the
appearance of so many
new buildings. Architecture,
like art, reflects the
spirit of a people and
of their time. For
me, and for millions
of others, the World
Trade Center was a symbol
of our strength as a
nation, our aspirations,
and our need to strive
and excel. I
feel relieved knowing
that I have created this
piece of art that preserves
the original World Trade
Center skyline and its
place in history."
While she was in New York, even Regis stopped by to check out her stuff. If you'd
like to see it in person..... some of her work is on display at the Nemacolin
gallery through the end of the year. |
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