Constructions in Chrome

Sculptors once created statues out of marble and wood because the materials were there and, besides, they were beautiful. Some contemporary sculptors use "found objects"--stovepipes, bedsprings and other bits of wreckage from junkyards or used-car lots--because these materials are there and because the artists feel that their ugliness reflects the seaminess of the times.

New York's bearded, gently humorous Jason Seley, 47, whose latest show opened at Manhattan's Kornblee Gallery last week, strives for the best of both worlds. His angular, hole-marked and hollowly curvilinear pieces are welded together from junk. But since he works with slightly used chrome-plated automobile bumpers, the results are so gleamingly bright and so artfully constructed that some viewers are unaware that they are looking at automobile bumpers at all.

Seley fell in love with his first bumper in 1956. Waiting for his car to be fixed in a junkyard adjoining a garage, he and his wife were struck by the distinctive shape of a '49 Buick Dyna-flow bumper. Convinced that there was still more "beauty to be extracted from it," he bought it for $1 --much to the amazement of the garage owner, since the Seleys' car was a Chevvy. Seley, who at the time was casting Henry Mooreish semi-abstracts in plaster and terra cotta, began using bumpers as armatures, covering them with plaster, then casting the result in bronze or aluminum. By 1959, he had decided it was "a sacrilege to cover the beautiful bumper form," began working with the armature alone.

As he has mastered his medium, Seley has made his work less elongated, now welds many bumpers together in solid, chunky shapes instead of letting them stick out like the spines of a giant cactus. His forms have also been influenced by the style of the bumpers available at the Long Island car-parts supply house, where he buys them. Prince Valiant, so called because of its similarity to a Viking's shield, utilizes the rococo protuberances found on 1958 Oldsmobiles, of a type sometimes known in the auto industry as "Dagmars" (for the well-rounded TV comedienne of the 1950s), but the more streamlined and recent Arabesque is based on four sleek pieces from a 1965 Ford compact. Says Seley: "I'm going right along with Detroit."

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