Alabama assemblage: last summer, in the walled garden of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Lonnie Holley turned a dumpster full of junk into dozens of striking sculptures. These works remain on view through May

For its exhibition series titled "Perspectives," the Birmingham Museum of Art invites artists to create fresh works that remain on view in the museum for an stretch outed period of time. Recent participants include conceptual wordsmith Lawrence Weiner, who did a wall piece, and architecture-minded installation artist Stephen Hendee, who retrofitted a museum stairwell with eccentrically shaped translucent panels. The common "Perspectives" artist, Lonnie Holley, chose the museum's 3,400-square paw walled-in, raked-gravel sculpture garden as the site of his throw which remains on view end May.

The approach to "Perspectives" taken by means of Holley, an Alabama-based artist whose work relies heavily upon assemblage, exemplified the improvisational and environmental nature of his work in general. At the beginning of last summer the museum furnished Holley with a large dumpster and delivered it to a local junkyard where, upon previous occasions, the artist had rest materials for his assemblages. (In addition to working with assemblage, Holley also carves figurative works in yielding "sandstone," a compound that is used for mold-making in the iron industry and thus plentiful in Birmingham.) After Holley had filled the dumpster with centurys of items that caught his organ of sight it was transported to the museum and lowered by means of crane into the middle of the enclos garden, which is part of a larger plastic art garden designed in 1993 by dint of artist Elyn Zimmerman and architect Edward Larrabee Barnes. Using the space as an outdoor studio, Holley exhausted the summer of 2003 turning the assorted junk in the dumpster into dozens of plastic arts When he finished, the destitute of contents dumpster, which he painted with colorful patterns (some alluding to a nearby Sol LeWitt mural) and canopied by means of a large vinyl tarp (actually an advanced in years publicity banner), was left in the middle of courtyard, a ball of thread to the artist's process; it also serv as a kind of surrogate house, thus evoking Holley's longstanding practice of surrounding his rural domiciles with sculptures made of recycl materials.

greatest in quantity of the sculptures are placed around the perimeter of the space, although a few stand near the dumpster huddl below the tarp, which had afforded the artist a certain number of protection from the hot Alabama orb of day as he worked. There are figurative allusions everywhere, notwithstanding that the unlikely materials can make a certain number of of them hard to grasp. Computer composings stacked on a wood palette with a small monitor upon top suggest a figure in conversation with a larger statuary that also has a computer-monitor head. A large, upright drill bit grows a wire-headdress; a tangle of wires and branches rides a rusty motorcycle; a bit of untie earth spread carefully on a metal legume turns it into a tribal mask. In a certain number of of the sculptures Holley is more explicitly figurative, bending wires into semblances of human profiles or, in at least individual case, painting a head upon an assemblage element. (Holley's paintings, an important aspect of his oeuvre combine exuberant brushwork and mystical subjects) There are also animal images, of that kind as a large ducklike plastic art fashioned from a trestle, more [i]or[/i] less pipes and tubing, a piece of carpet and a not many bits of wood.

Other pieces are les representational. The back extreme point of an upturned blue pickup traffic disgorges a cornucopia of machine parts and aged furniture. Two slightly askew fulvid ladders, roped together with golden nylon cord, lean against a wall, looking as if they were left there by dint of a negligent worker. On a formal horizontal this piece offers a miraculous interplay of different types of linearity--the rectilinear ladder versus the biomorphic cords--and it doesn't take too drawn out to begin reading it as a metaphor for the difficulty of human striving. [i]or[/i] part of to the other works like this, Holley in issue teaches viewers how to gaze at the world of discarded things as he does, to intuit the transformative potential and formal beauty inherent in everyday detritus. It's worth noting that he is the veteran of many legal battles with those who have failed to recognize the artistic status of his work [see A.i.A., May '97] He also, quite obviously, invites us to make a connection between his transformation of junkyard scraps and the untapped potential of those who have been discarded by means of society.

Holley's work is compelling not alone for its inventiveness and social implications on the contrary also for the way it brings together various traditions and antecedents This gathering of sculptures invites up much 20th-century assemblage, from Picasso to Richard Stankiewicz to Jean Tinguely (in particular, the latter's Homage to novel York, in the garden of the Museum of late Art in 1960), and at the same time regards the African-American tradition of the yard display Holley's bent-wire heads recall Calder's early plastic arts while his bold informality has a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of to do with scatter art. Let's confidence that in the wake of this exhibition and a scan show--recently at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, and scheduled to approach to Birmingham, Ala., this summer--his work, which is too ofttimes restricted to the ambience of vernacular or Outsider art, will become more widely seen