Where fabrication meets art

By Mary Mulhern

"Don’t leave Frank alone in the room with anything, because you’ll come back and there will just be a pile of parts." This was not just a family joke, but also a fact of life, as the Strunk family discovered piles of appliance parts in little Frank’s wake.

Highly intelligent, mechanically gifted, but never truly engaged academically, Frank Strunk III was born and spent the first 31 years of his life in Rockville, Md. He managed to pass one of his junior college courses, only after doing a brake job on the instructor’s car. After college, he made a living in carpentry, auto mechanics and commercial printing.

His grandfather, the first Frank Strunk, was an Appalachian coal miner; his father Frank Strunk II ran a commercial printing business and later became a successful real estate investor in Florida. In 1995, Frank III moved to Florida, where he went into business with his father in real estate investment and restoration.

Just as he began to make a decent living and earn his father’s admiration for his business acumen, Strunk had an epiphany: The work of fabrication — a gift he had always enjoyed — needed to be his art. Now a sculptor and designer at 41, Strunk came to call himself an artist and "follow his bliss" only in the last five years. Construction and carpentry jobs are now accepted only when daily survival necessitates.

Strunk’s work has been shown in galleries and alternative art spaces, and commercial establishments. Many of his relief sculptures, all of the lighting designs and much interior design at The Bank nightclub in St. Petersburg are his.

He is still taking things apart, but puts entirely new objects together out of the deconstructed components. His art is inextricably tied to the materials and process of labor. Basic construction methods, simple tools and elemental materials are employed in each work. They are comprised of new industrial materials such as conduit and sheet metal as well as used and rusted parts and found objects like toys and old signage. 3

Some works have a straightforward modernist esthetic. Rectangular wall pieces are minimalist geometric collages of rusted and acid-washed galvanized steel, with rich topographical surfaces. Mixed media constructions of found objects (usually hardware) are reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and Joseph Cornell’s boxes. "Gift" has an assortment of rusty nuts, bolts and gears in a tiny wood grid, separated like the compartments in a jewelry box.

Strunk’s witty kinetic sculptures, though they have working parts — motors, hammers, gears — don’t actually serve any function. They are about work but don’t actually do any. "Eight Hammers," a recent piece, is an elegantly simple circular wall piece with spokes of hinged levers that end in hammers, which slowly and alternately hit nails on their heads. Another kinetic piece, "Workhorse," is an assemblage with a toy horse whose galloping legs work puppet strings that move the limbs of a doll beneath him.

Strunk’s first gallery show featured his lighting designs at Eighth End, a former Ybor City gallery. Despite his nerves before the opening, every piece sold.

While he insists, "I’m not a fashion designer, I’m a fabricator," his latest foray into wearable art was a resounding success. At last summer’s "Wearable Art" fashion show at the Dunedin Fine Arts Center, Strunk’s aluminum couture stole the show.

A belly dancer packing gasoline nozzles attached by conduit to a bustier decorated with bicycle bells, undulated, clanged and strutted her way down the runway. One model, girded by a steel mesh mini with protruding washer studded bolts managed to limbo gracefully out of the curtain. The finale delighted the crowd as one silver model shot glitter out her headdress to shower the entire audience in silver.

His fashion engineering and art innovations include lights, steam, music and beautiful lines and volumes. Costume is just another avenue for Strunk’s creative fabrication of industrial parts and forms.

While questioning our culture’s work ethic, which he sees as stifling spirituality and self-expression, the pure joy expressed in the process — the work — of his creations actually elevates the meaning of work. There is beauty in the rusty futility and shiny geometric forms of his constructions and an undeniable love of the material of industry.