Art All Night — one of Trenton’s “hot” events — is about to get even hotter.
In addition to hosting hundreds of artists exhibiting and working on site, scores of musicians performing on three stages, and more than 20,000 visitors, this year’s free arts festival — spanning Saturday and Sunday, June 18 and 19 — features a 24-hour presentation by one of the nation’s only arts organization using molten metal as a medium, the Trenton-based AbOminOg Intl.
“It’s the 10th anniversary (of Art All Night) and we’re fired up to put on a spectacular show,” group members say after their Kickstarter campaign met their costs to create a metal pour on the grounds where once stood the powerful Trenton steel giant John A. Roebling and Sons.
AbOminOg (pronounced ah-baum-in-og) is a group as unusual as its name. As part of a 1999 New Year’s Eve celebration in a Trenton backyard, a band of central New Jersey area metal artists — including former workers of the then recently phased out Johnson Atelier foundry — celebrated their love of 19th-century technology by constructing a metal casting facility to produce artwork difficult to make outside a commercial fine arts foundry.
Since the group involved artists of diverse backgrounds, age groups, and skill levels, the artists found themselves wanting to continue and create metal art “within an inspiring, supportive, and sustainable setting” and “to expand our positive impact on the community and the art world at large through increased capacity and outreach,” notes the group’s mission statement.
Now AbOminOg brings artists and supporters together for iron casting events. Its members include some of the most familiar sculptors and artists in the region: Kate Graves, Bruce Lindsay, Aylin Green, Rory Mahon, Scott Thompson, Rein Triefeldt, and others who were involved with the atelier or Grounds For Sculpture.
M. C. (Matt) Reiley, one of the founding members, says the group’s name comes from a furnace the group used for its first pour. “We just liked the sound of it. It was a kick-ass name for a kick-ass furnace.”
The “intl” — for international — Reiley says, was happenstance. Many of the group’s artists were foreign-born and remained in the region after the foundry at the Johnson Atelier ceased operations.
AbOminOg is headquartered in the former Scudder Foundry, once part of the old Roebling works on Pearl Street in Trenton. Foundry work is important to the group’s art — and to Trenton’s history.
“I am a foundry man and have built a lot of furnaces. This is how I express myself. I love the material, and it adds the concept for me. When you get hit by one of my pieces you stay hit,” says Reiley, who as associate director of conservation and senior conservator for Central Park Conservancy divides time between New York City and Trenton.
“I like to transmit ideas, and I think that using hot metal is a great transmitter. It’s a material that is being more or less transmogrified from a liquid sort of hyperactive media into a solid. If you were to look into metal on some microscopic level in molten form you would see a lot of molecules in dynamic motion — fast and fast moving. When the metal becomes cool it is in a much more staid form. It’s part of my concept. Rather than just see how the piece appears, there’s a concept with the material itself. It’s pretty cool to take an element and alter it. The power of the act of creation is reinforced by making a metal art,” he says.
Reiley’s involvement with the art started with his father, who while running a liquor store and bar business in Manchester, Connecticut, became an arms and armor expert. “He was doing restoration work, and I was exposed to different art forms and going to museums.” That interest morphed into studying art and sculpture at the University of Connecticut.
“Metal has an effect on me. I don’t know how I could explain it. Early on I knew that I wanted to cast metal. Casting would enable me to transform. You don’t get much more tangible than heavy, hot metal.”
He came to the Trenton area in the early 1990s after seeing an art magazine ad for interns at the Johnson Atelier. “I was proficient at several phases of production so I basically learned the foundry profession on the floor.”
The attraction was not high salaries, Reiley says, but the after-hours program where artists could work in the shop and create. “You had to pay the material cost, but you don’t have to set up the foundry.”
When the atelier phased out the foundry in the late 1990s, Reiley began moving into independent work and creating the group. “I was maintaining contact with artists at the atelier. Others were attracted and got on board; it’s always been on the precept of helping one another. It was not done for commercial gain, except for the reason that artists have to create their own works. So it was ‘let’s find a way to help to create work.’”
Around the same time, he decided to take a journey and visit the Burning Man Festival, the massive self-proclaimed “radical self-expressive” arts festival held annually in Nevada. “So I got in my truck, participated in Burning Man, and then drove around for five months. I was 31, so I made the jump. No regrets. I’m so glad that I did it.”
When Reiley returned to the Trenton area, he and other iron artists gathered for that New Year’s celebration that led into the new millennium.
It also led Reiley to a new phase of his life: he started his own business, signed a lease on the foundry shop, and joined the others in creating the organization that is now becoming regionally famous for its dramatic pours.
“It’s an all-volunteer force. Anytime we needed equipment or upgrades to our process or production, I was paying out of my pocket. It wasn’t sustainable,” says Reiley.
The group has become a nonprofit and determined core fees that cover materials and other expenditures to create the events. The goal was to raise $7,000 on Kickstarter. It raised more than $10,000.
“The iron melting process requires a collaborative effort. My friends and other like-thinking people gravitated around it. What the collective offers is the opportunity to make cast metal art, if you’re willing to invest your sweat energy,” he says.
The process is also part of Trenton’s heavy metal history that spans the creation of Colonial-era steel mills, the emergence of the I-beam, and Roebling’s steel and wire.
Reiley believes the Art All Night event brings the art and regional history to life. “I think our events touch a lot of people and show it to kids who never were exposed to the process. I think our reach is far” — one that connects to the city’s past and its future.
Art All Night is a project of Artworks, Trenton’s downtown visual arts center that “promotes artistic diversity by fostering creativity, learning, and appreciation of the arts” through classes, exhibitions, and special events.
Music performers include Danielia Cotton, Honah Lee, Paul Plumeri, Dave Orban and the Mojo Gypsies, Earth Wonder Fire, Teeel, and numerous more.
Art All Night, Roebling Wire Works building, 675 South Clinton Avenue, adjacent to the Roebling Market, Trenton. Saturday, June 18, 3 p.m. through, Sunday, June 19, 3 p.m. Donation requested. www.artworkstrenton.org.
,
