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Saturday, April 10, 2010

Motorcycle lawn ornament stops people in their tracks

General News
By Brian Mackey
GateHouse News Service
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. —
If you’re driving down North Fifth Street in Springfield, watch out for the giant attack robot.

At roughly 10 feet tall, it’s hard to miss, standing on the east side of the street with one menacing, red eye visible behind a metal visor.

The robot is guarding the end of the driveway of its creator, Travis Taylor, a handyman-turned-artist who works out of a shed behind his house.

Taylor said he built it mostly from a broken-down motorcycle his nephew was hoping to restore.

“He was gone one day, and I had some metal laying around and got to thinking about it,” Taylor said. “I just chopped it up and started building it.”

The final product has recognizable motorcycle parts: the gas tank is the head, the exhaust pipes extend down the back like a jet pack, the drive chain is draped through an arm-mounted Gatling gun like an ammunition belt.

But there are non-motorcycle parts, too. The pelvis is made from a piece of an old weight-lifting machine, and there’s a large soup can in the middle of the torso.

Almost every component of Taylor’s sculptures is reclaimed material, much of it obtained from friends and family — like a Pabst Brewing Co. keg he dug out of the mud at a friend’s dad’s farm. It was stamped with a “74” — indicating the year it was produced — and still had beer inside.

The keg is part of his next large sculpture, which he is keeping under wraps until he’s ready to unveil it.

“It’s about making something out of nothing, with next to nothing,” Taylor said. “My most high-tech tool is this welder. I have a welder and a grinder and that’s it.”

Art crowd control

That fits with the theme of Taylor’s show last year at the Hoogland Center for the Arts in Springfield: “Spare Parts to Art.”

One of his smaller pieces, which Taylor had on his front porch last week, was a tabletop-sized model of a twister made from materials salvaged from the wreckage of the 2006 tornado.

04082010traviscover.jpg Artist Travis Taylor's newest creation is called "Sybia", made from motorcycle parts and various scrap pieces. T.J. Salsman/The State Journal-Register s/untoned/0408
04082010travis3.jpg Taylor is busy in his workshop creating his next installation--a larger-than-life piece that he hopes to unveil soon. T.J. Salsman/The State Journal-Register s/untoned/0408
Old motorcycle parts make up the main portion of Taylor's creation. The artwork has been turning heads on south Fifth Street for several weeks.

Taylor has had no formal education in art or sculpture. He said he had a handyman business until about a year ago, when the economic downturn took its toll on that line of work. So he decided to try making art he could sell.

He said he’s not entirely comfortable hanging with the art crowd.

“I am just so out of my element, because they’re talking about, ‘You know Richard Marcos from 1912 to this thing?’ And I’m like, ‘Uhh ... nope,’ ” Taylor said.

He staged the art show on his own, not going through any of the existing arts organizations or cooperatives.

“I went to my sponsors, people who had been invested, and I said I have all these pieces (and) I want to put on an art show,” Taylor said. “I need this amount of money, and if I can get it and put it together, then you get a percentage of what goes on.

“It went off smashingly, and that was with no help from anybody that had ever remotely been an artist. (Instead it was) people who really believe that the stuff was good. That was the shocking part.”

He also exhibited during an art walk downtown last year, but said that’s the extent of his experience as a professional artist.

“I get more reaction and praise from having this art in my yard than at any of these other events,” he said.

As of last Friday, Taylor said he’d had the robot in front of his house for about two weeks, and people were still stopping to gawk.

“I’ll see kids walking down the street: they’re rolling real hard, they got frowns on their faces, looking mean,” Taylor said. “They’ll see (the robot) and they’ll stop, and just for that moment, they forget all that stuff. They’re just people looking at something amazing; they’re awestruck for a few minutes.

“Then they realize it, look around, get back tough and walk on.

“So just for that little bit ... we’re basically what we are: in awe of everything around us.”

Brian Mackey can be reached at 217-747-9587.

original article