May 26, 1999
'Re-use Moose' loose
Artists combine talents & reused products
By Garret Leiva
Herald staff writer
With groves of gas stations, forests of fast food restaurants and acres of asphalt parking lots, South Airport Road seems a habitat most 700 pound moose would find inhospitable. Then again, most creatures don't have a hide of laminated lumber.
Standing six-feet high at the shoulders and 8 feet long, the "RE-USE Moose" undoubtedly draws plenty of double-takes from drivers along South Airport Road. Of course that is one of the reasons why Bruce Odom had the sculpture built in the first place.
"I felt the resources at NMC (Northwestern Michigan College) available to the community are going unnoticed, and this was the perfect opportunity to link the college with the business world, said the owner of Odom Reusable Building Materials, who dedicated the sculpture during a ceremony Thursday outside his South Airport Road store.
"The sculpture - which represents the store's mascot - also evokes a reverence for the environment and natural materials that ties into not wasting and throwing away reusable items."
To showcase both the artistic talent at NMC and the importance of salvaged materials, the life-size sculpture was designed and constructed by students in Mike Torre's 3-D art class at the request of Odom. The five-month long project was an entire class effort, Torre noted, from moose model designs to cutting out antlers using an industrial strength jigsaw.
While creating a creature of this magnitude was a first-time venture for Torre's class, seeing salvaged hardwood and hardware become artwork was an equally new experience for Odom.
Composed of nearly 100 percent used building materials, the dominate feature of the "RE-USE Moose" is the six sculpted doors salvaged from the Traverse City Central High School remodeling project. Other notable features include bathroom grab rails from the Cherryland Mall and cedar flooring from a deconstructed Long Lake log cabin. It is the 1959 Lumbercore doors hauled from the high school, however, that carries the greatest weight - and interest - on this particular body of work.
"We kind of like to think that the doors came from the art department," said Torre, a pottery, 3-D design and drawing instructor at NMC.
"One of my older students had gone to Central and she thought the door numbered 409 was from the art room. So that was kind of cool."
Finding the entire project equally cool was second-year NMC student, Samatha Riner. Although working on a life-size wooden mammal was hardly new territory for the visual communications major.
"I worked on a six-foot baby giraffe made of wood when I was in high school. I never thought I'd end up doing something like this again," admitted the Beulah resident.
Working with her father in the construction trade, Riner also found compelling the opportunity to make a moose out of material that under different circumstances would have ended up in a dumpster. "I was there when we had to throw away materials and I hated it," she said.
Standing back and admiring the tongue and groove handiwork, Riner - who received a certificate of appreciation during the dedication ceremony - said seeing the completed sculpture along the shoulder of South Airport Road was reward enough.
"The beauty of taking building materials that would have normally been thrown away and turning it into a life-size moose, that's not something you see everyday," she said.