The massive J & L/LTV South Side Works dominated Pittsburgh's South Side for more than 100 years. Then it was gone. The large rolling mills were dismantled and the furnaces scrapped. The site became a moonscape of brick and twisted metal scrap as it waited to be reassembled into the South Side Works, a retail and residential community. Between its life as a steel mill and its reformation into the South Side Works, Pittsburgh-based artists Michael Picarsic III and Lorraine Vullo discovered the old mill site. They foraged for months among the wasteland that was once a mighty steel mill. The result is Recrudescence, a collaboration of photographs and sculptures.

Picarsic and Vullo explored and observed the mill's ruins and their artistic response took the shape of sculptures constructed from industrial debris and pinhole photographs, an obsolete form of photography.Recrudescence is an abstract reminder of a different time and place, a re-ordering of the old into something completely refreshing and new. The brown Van Dyke archival photographs are a nostalgic and beautiful counter point to carefully constructed contemporary abstract sculptures.

INTRODUCTION

Donald Kuspit
Memorializing and Mythologizing Big Steel: The Picarsic/Vullo Recrudescence Project

ESSAY

Graham Shearing
Recrudescence: The Project

STRUCTURES

A NOTE

August R. Carlino