Brett Richards loves stone and metal, and it shows in the attention to detail and visual appeal of his 13 abstract and figurative sculptures at All Rise. What attracts him is “the permanence of the material and the fact that you need so much more power than just the strength of your hands to form it. I’ve always been attracted to structural steel, its strength and stability and what it’s capable of doing. If you have enough I beams, you can build a skyscraper or a bridge.” While attending a summer class at Oxbow in 2004, Richards found several I beams at a nearby scrap yard and decided to try altering them: once he’d built an oversize wrench, it took six people to turn it and twist the beams. These pieces “started out as experimentation,” he says, “to see what I was capable of doing as far as manipulating metal. I got some interesting forms.” His first one-person show, which included these works, was installed last year in the offices of a gear manufacturer in Harwood Heights. Five pieces in the present show are made from another piece of scrap metal, a square steel tube that once served as a support for a gas station sign. He cut it up and, after heating it, re-formed the individual sides of the tube with a hammer. “I like that I’m eliminating the original purpose of the tube,” he says.
