A. Clarke Bedford sits on the front steps of his art-encrusted house in Hyattsville, Md., known as “Vanadu.” By Petula Dvorak Petula Dvorak Local columnist Email Bio Follow Columnist March 25 at 1:53 PM His front door slowly creaked open and a woman walked into his living room with four of her friends closely behind her.
It’s a house totally encrusted with metal, glass and tossed objects painted, molded, bolted, twisted, sawed and drilled into art, like a coral reef that has grown more complex, sculptural and fantastical over the years. It’s Burning Man done by a man who has never been to Burning Man.Bedford, a former conservator at the Hirshhorn Museum, has turned half a dozen cars into an art installation. “I’m sort of a homebody,” he said.
“It takes great technical and historical knowledge to pull off this feat. Bedford obviously has both. For example, his shadow-drenched ‘Humpty Dumpty at Notre Dame,’ in which an eggheaded statue replaces the usual brooding gargoyle, caricatures Charles Negre’s seminal 1850s series on the architectural details of Notre Dame.”
I know some art words. And I can try to use them to describe what Bedford does. Outsider art, folk art, Dadaism, steampunk, Victorian modernism all with an upcycler ethos? And then he couldn’t stop. He has six cars now — the Saab, as well as a van, a bus, a Volkswagen Beetle, a Volvo and a Chevy Caprice wagon. All of them are drivable. Not practical, though. When he recently sawed into his thumb and had to drive himself to the hospital, he had to consider which car would fit into the parking garage. None of them, really.
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