A cloth-wrapped shopping cart, a 12-foot giraffe made from wire frame and plastic, and a spinning globe crowded with action figures is drawing crowds at Port Orchard’s Sidney Art Gallery and Museum.
The art is on display through Sept. 26.
David Lewis, 75, stitched together “Mobile Home Soup Kitchen,” a shopping cart sculpture mounted on the base of an old baby carriage and filled with a painted Campbell’s soup bag that nods to Andy Warhol’s pop art.
“I make the art for myself and then show it,” Lewis said. “It’s just really neat to have something local, and I really appreciate the gallery.”
Lewis described the work as a slow build he started in winter and finished for the show. “I got the sewing machine out, went through a lot of spools of thread, and I purposely frayed all the edges,” he said. He said the cart’s cloth came from draperies he found at St. Vincent de Paul and that he welded a baby carriage frame to give the piece structure.
A largely self-taught artist with roots in Seattle’s late-20th-century art scene, Lewis said he favors recycled materials and low-tech production. He has won first place in his category at the Helen Norris show before and expects to return for the gallery’s Winner’s Circle exhibition in January.
Nearby, artist Dan Zwink’s giraffe and globe reward close inspection. Zwink, a retired machinist, said he has “always been a person that likes building things” and that his ideas often arrive by accident — a stalled beaver project, for example, morphed into a UFO when he noticed a tabletop’s shape.
His giraffe is constructed from a wire frame wrapped with zip-tied plastic in two tones; he said the mane is “actually made out of paintbrushes” and the tail from electrical cords. Zwink said he built the sculpture in sections so it could fit through an elevator and later rebuilt the neck to restore the animal’s proportions after moving to a lower garage ceiling.
The globe combines the playful and the technical. “I always like to hide things in my creations,” Zwink said. “There’s a lot of stuff hidden.” He said he used a Lazy Susan to create a turntable base and welded everyday objects — “saw blades … clips and tent pegs” — into the outlines of continents. He then cut and zip-tied colored plastic to fit those outlines and attached “little action figures and boats and planes” in roughly appropriate places to give the piece “more action and stuff of what’s going on.”
Both artists said the Sidney gallery allows them to show work without the expense and logistics of larger regional exhibitions. Lewis said that accessibility matters for artists who work with reclaimed materials and modest budgets. Zwink said he enjoys the reaction his work gets from families and children.
“I enjoy having people enjoy my stuff,” Zwink said.
Zwink’s globe is made with a Lazy Susan to create a turntable base. Zwink’s globe is made with a Lazy Susan to create a turntable base.
