Designs for living Troy and Anker West’s socially-conscious views BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Encountering Troy West’s charcoal drawings of derelict industrial buildings for the first time 13 years ago, I was thunderstruck. Here they were, ramshackle granite block mills and brick factories, buildings I would have driven by without wasting a glance, and West not only found beauty in them, he all but made them come alive. With expressionistic energy, and hardly a right angle, he resurrected their former vitality with sweeping black lines.

Some of those large drawings are in "Art and Architecture by a Father and Son," at Westerly Public Library’s spacious Hoxie Gallery through July 31, but there is much more on display. For this is a retrospective of the work of two artists: the elder Troy, who is a socially-conscious architect as well as an artist, and his son Anker, who is a sculptor and ceramist and has worked with his father on many urban design projects and proposals.

Outside the library, in the adjoining Wilcox Park, are two tall, playful scrap-metal sculptures, one by each artist. Near the side entrance is Troy’s Bi-clops (2004), an armless assemblage with two eyes on one side and one on the other. Along a path to the left from there and atop a knoll is Anker’s rough-hewn Windmill (2004). It actually turns if the breeze is strong enough, but its offering is more a rough-edged homage to beating junk into use than to threatening utility monopolies.

Inside the gallery, however, more than visual entertainment is on the bill. Much of the wall space is devoted to drawings, neighborhood maps, and models from several urban planning competitions and proposals the pair have worked on. Represented are their elaborate plans for Broad Street in Providence, a competition they won, although funding never came through for the $50 million project.

Their urgent, though not strident, anti-war orientation — pro-peace, if you like — is the undercurrent of much of their artwork and sweeps away even esthetic considerations. Troy’s sculptures employ welded scrap metal and found objects, implying both an environmental concern and, since politics is the context, frustration with this country’s waste. Five percent of the world’s population, using one-fifth of its resources — you know the drill.

Troy’s Freedom Doorway (2003) is an archway of two facing flags, metal bars forming their red stripes, the flags pushing each other off balance as they prop each other up. The stars spell "WAR" and "FEAR" on one side, "OIL" and "$" on the other. This might be my favorite sculpture of Troy’s — and I wince at agitprop sooner than many do. The symbolic tension is on the money, the emptiness where white stripes would be, the gateway relevance. The piece is nearly as strong as when it stood at the entrance of Hera last year at the "Democracy Under Siege" show that Troy curated with his wife, artist Claudia Flynn. Then, as now, viewers are invited to write statements about freedom and democracy, which are rolled up and inserted along the sculpture’s supports.

He often uses the American flag in his works, repurposing it from battlefield use. Troy’s small sculpture Uncle Sam’s Chair (2002) has a flag-striped chair in the center, atop a white stripe containing two rows of blue eyes divided by a ragged red gully. These eyes are greatly outnumbered by brown eyes on backgrounds of brown and black, representing the proportion of people in America with such colored skin and eyes.

Towering high, the physical centerpiece of the show is Anker’s Arms Dealer (2004). The scrap-wood figure painted primer red — or blood red, if you like — has a silver bomb under one arm and holds up a silver Styrofoam airplane in the opposite hand, poised for launch. The scale is what makes it work. If it were life-size rather than perhaps 10 feet tall, its threat would be merely polemical and not also visceral. Another way that Anker sets a tone of sometimes ironic dignity, and uses a motif distinct from his father’s, is to occasionally borrow the architectural detail of a pediment, the shallow triangle atop the façade of Grecian-inspired federal buildings.

Many of the objects in this exhibition are models for large public sculptures that may never be built, so sometimes we only get to imagine our impression. The upraised hand — not fist — of welcome in Anker’s foot-high model of a proposed gateway to Newark is one example; rising high above us, hospitality could ingeniously evoke awe.

An open hand also comes into a proposal by his father. That is the shape of a pool at the base of a "peace fountain" in the center of a small traffic roundabout park accessed by four walkways, a proposal for Dale Carlia Corner in Wakefield.

Troy was active in an ill-fated community effort to prevent a small shopping center from coming to Route 1 in Wakefield in 2003. In addition to the architect drawing up plans for an alternative, which would have brought more shops — and pedestrian traffic — to an existing commercial strip along Main Street, the artist in him contributed too. Troy constructed numerous sculptures of protest and environmental concern and had them transported at his expense to the lawn outside the town’s art center. In the retrospective, "Homage to Sprawl" is one of them that works particularly well. One element consists of toy cars and trucks, bumper to bumper on lengths of metal fencing uprights. In the center is a dry "pond" containing fishing lures, laid out as dead as sunfish in a dried-up lake bed.

"Art and Architecture by a Father and Son" is an intriguing exhibition, broad in subject matter. Troy and Anker West have clearly developed a familial symbiosis, and it is fascinating to explore its intricacies.

"Art and Architecture By a Father And Son"

At Hoxie Art Gallery, 44 Broad Street, Westerly, through July 31.