Month: December 2002

Before long, family vacations may take you to the “redeemed” site of a former toxic dump. The unnatural history of such a park won’t necessarily be posted along the trail, either. More likely, the truth will be trapped beneath “cap and cover” vegetation and other peek-a-boo devices. Landscape architect Julie Bargmann refers to that process as “putting lipstick on a pig.”

Bargmann’s Charlottesville studio, Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain (D.I.R.T.), offers a provocative counter to conventional makeovers of polluted sites. In her work, re-thinking degraded terrain isn’t a process of burial and disguise.

“I feel committed to giving the landscape a voice,” she explains. That voice may whisper of abuse, but it also speaks of the people who spent their lives in the factories, mines and industries that have shaped the country. Sometimes, too, a butterfly emerges from an acid mine.

For instance, in the former coal town of Vintondale, Pennsylvania, Bargmann—in collaboration with environmental artist Stacy Levy and others—converted a toxic property into a surreal, 35-acre public park. The ongoing project converts acid-mine drainage, a heavy-metal stew swept via rain from the mine into streams, destroying aquatic life and degrading water quality. At this park, visitors don’t stand before pristine falls but instead witness the psychedelic flow of a sulfuric acid stream downgrading its poisons, beautifully. As the water moves through limestone cleansing channels, it changes like a sunset from fiery orange to green, then blue.

In addition to helping create works like the Vintondale project, the 43-year-old Bargmann is an associate professor of landscape architecture at UVA, and conducts research there as well. In 1999 she taught a class at the controversial Ivy Landfill, where students proposed options for the site’s future, such as a park for extreme sports. Often, says Bargmann, she’s a student too, always prepared to try out a new technology. Tools like bioremediation and phytoremediation—using microbes and plants to detoxify an area—are her brushes, while dirty sites are the canvas.

There’s no end to the canvas, either—the country’s growing supply of long-lived toxic materials has become more and more a part of everyday life. In the United States alone there are more than 600,000 brownfields (industrial waste sites), ranging in size from a quarter of an acre to 1,300 acres.

Restoring these sites is expensive. Often the responsible party is long gone and the issue mired in politics—something Bargmann, who doesn’t consider herself a message-bearing eco-activist, has never embraced. “It’s healthier for me,” she says, laughing, “to focus on the landscape itself.” In the case of Vintondale, Bargmann and crew worked largely pro bono.

Rejuvenating toxic sites wasn’t always her goal. Bargmann began her career with a degree in sculpture. When studio work began feeling “too precious” she turned to landscape architecture, with an eye toward industrial ruins. Now she works more with forces than form, and rarely does so alone. Drawings help with visualization, but the interdisciplinary nature of her work involves engineers, scientists, artists and others.

While the collaborative effort and its lofty goals attract much favorable media attention, there’s also controversy surrounding Bargmann’s work. Not every company—or community—cares to unveil certain aspects of its history. After all, her job involves letting existing materials show through, even as a site undergoes metamorphosis. In Front Royal, for example, it was slow-going for the Avtex Fibers Plant when it tried to get the community’s approval to remediate the site. Not everyone felt that the place should be preserved.

Currently, Bargmann is working with the local think tank E Squared, as well as on Superfund sites (while the Bush administration has nixed the Superfund, an Environmental Protection Agency grant has allowed UVA to create the Center of Expertise for Superfund Site Recycling, with which she’s involved). She also has a book coming out in 2002, titled Toxic Beauty.

A serial rapist is on the loose in Charlottesville––police suspect the same man is responsible for at least five sexual assaults in the past six years, including a November 11 attack in the Willoughby subdivision. The violent nature of the attacks has attracted local media, but City and UVA rape counselors say rape, in all its varieties, is an almost everyday occurrence in Charlottesville.

Recently, C-VILLE uncovered the disparity between sexual assaults reported to police and those reported to Charlottesville’s Sexual Assault Resource Agency [EXTRA!, October 29], citing SARA data. The agency received 250 new calls for service in 2001, mostly for rape or attempted rape. That year, Charlottesville police received 21 rape reports.

Counselors at SARA and the UVA Women’s Center say the vast majority of rapes are perpetrated by men known to the victim. For women, reporting such rapes can be difficult because they and their attackers may have friends or family in common. Prosecuting so-called date rape is challenging, say lawyers, because there usually is no break-in, no knife to the throat, no witness and usually no proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Given the frequency of sexual assaults and the relative paucity of media reports on the subject, SARA client services coordinator Kristine Hall wonders whether local press such as The Daily Progress is interested in the City’s rape problem, or just the gory details of violent crime.

“When we hear there’s a serial rapist in the community, the perception is that it’s something uncommon,” says Hall. “The reality is that these things are happening every day. SARA’s daily activities center around the fact that sexual assaults are fairly frequent in our community, and that most sex offenders are serial,” says Hall.

Using DNA evidence, Charlottesville police have linked five unsolved sexual assaults between February 1997 and November 11. The attacks occurred on Jefferson Park Avenue, 13th Street NW, Emmet Street and Willoughby, as well as one attack in Waynesboro. Two victims were UVA students.

The announcement from law enforcement officials linking these and possibly other rapes has created no visible stir at UVA, says Claire Kaplan, sexual assault coordinator at UVA’s Women’s Center. “I bet when students come back from vacation, if there’s another incident, we’ll see an escalation in worry,” Kaplan says.

Like Hall, she says heightened attention on the attacks of a single rapist obscures the ubiquitous reality of sexual assault.

“There are people doing this kind of thing all the time that we don’t hear about,” she says. “The only difference is this guy is attacking people he doesn’t know.” When women are raped by acquaintances, Kaplan says, “they’re silenced by that.”

More ominously, the police report actually can lure women into a false sense of security, Kaplan says. “They can reassure themselves by saying, ‘I don’t fit the victim profile,’ or ‘I lock my doors,’” she says.

Hall says that in America a sexual assault occurs every two minutes; every nine minutes, an agency like SARA gets another call for service. But only the most disturbing crimes garner wider attention.

“The community rallies around those incidents because they feed our worst fears,” she says. “But fear is generally based on myth and misconception. All sexual assault is violent, and most of the cases we see involve pre-existing relationships.”–– John Borgmeyer

Chelsea south

Artsy galleries flood Water Street

Earlier this year some Downtown property owners floated an idea to officially turn the Mall into a tourist district. Some critics reckoned it would herald the Disney-fication of Charlottesville, polluting the Mall’s charm with middlebrow consumerism while bringing big bucks into the district. Meanwhile, one block south, a shopping and entertainment scene is shaping up on Water Street, spicing up the Mall with highbrow consumerism while bringing big bucks into the district. It’s being modeled after a neighborhood far to the north.

Lyn Bolen Rushton, owner of Les Yeux du Monde gallery, likens what is shaping up as the City’s new art corridor to “Charlottesville’s own little Chelsea.” Leah Stoddard, director of Second Street Gallery, which soon will relocate to Water Street, also invokes the Manhattan district when she describes SSG’s future home in the City Center for Contemporary Arts.

“The way it looks will be more akin to a gallery in Chelsea,” Stoddard says. “The floor will be polished cement, and the ceiling will be 14’ high.”

With Second Street Gallery set to share new digs with Live Arts and Lighthouse at the C3A, as it’s being dubbed, and Les Yeux du Monde settled already for two months in its new home one block away at the corner of Water and First streets, not to mention new money coming into even the guerilla art spaces, Water Street is getting pretty slick in parts. Swanky art spaces, upscale home-furnishing shops and restaurants are folded around a City bus stop and a couple of drab office fronts.

If Water Street is our Chelsea, then Nature Gallery, a decidedly more underground gallery run by John Lancaster and located at the back of the Jefferson Theater directly next door to the C3A, is the bohemian hideout that crouched there before the area got trendy. Lancaster says in three years it’s been a long, dirty process to turn the space—which features an 80-foot ceiling—into a presentable gallery.

“We had to build walls and clean out decades’ worth of trash,” he says. “The space has been used for lots of different purposes since 1915, so there was lots of interesting stuff back there.”

By contrast, the Les Yeux du Monde gallery is brand new, and so will be Second Street’s space. As has been previously reported, Second Street Gallery, with two exhibition rooms, will be better able to show films and projections, run children’s programming and otherwise expand its offerings, possibly putting the gallery on the road to a national reputation.

Rushton’s gallery has followed a salon-to-spectacle trajectory, starting out first in her home and now joining in a marquee space with E. G. Designs in the venture they call Dot2Dot. It occupies the corner retail space of the new chic Terrace and sells artwork and late-Modern furniture. Rushton’s vision is decidedly upscale and destination-cozy. “We’re going to have films and poetry readings, sell books and make it a more comfortable space to hang out,” she says. “We consider everything in the gallery to be art.”

Nature Gallery is setting its sights higher, too. Nature’s Lancaster recently went into partnership with the Consortium for Advancement of the Arts. Thus, his gallery has more funding and a new name—the Downtown Gallery at Nature (Predictably, people will persist in calling it Nature just as we say “Monticello” instead of the more cumbersome name of its benefactor, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation). Lancaster promises no compromise on his edgy programming, however. “We’re on the same page as far as what we’re looking to show,” he says, “highly original new art that’s thought-provoking.”

It’s a small world, after all.— Erika Howsare

 

Let it begin with me

Locust Grove group goes global; others follow

Heartened by recent news that the people of Charlottesville’s Locust Grove community declared the prospect of a U.S.-sponsored war on Iraq to be a threat to their neighborhood, on November 26 the United Chechen Front issued a statement requesting that other neighborhood associations in Central Virginia take a similar stand on international relations.

“It is our sincere hope that the good people of Johnson Village will recognize the link between the Chechen people’s struggle for liberation from the chokehold of that Czarist swine Putin and their own neighborhood security,” said Ilyas Bagayev from his hidden headquarters in Grozny. “That is, if they have resolved the issue of the rotting playground at their nearby elementary school.”

While there was no immediate comment from Johnson Village representatives, rumors soon circulated that members of the Belmont Neighborhood Association, newly cognizant of their international duties, were poring over a map of Asia to locate the hot spot most in need of support from the residents of Altavista Avenue. North Korea was mentioned. At press time, no resolution had been passed.

In its November 14 statement, the Locust Grove Neighborhood Association had cited the example of late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone as their spur to action. In the days since that announcement, and no doubt inspired by the courageous stance of the Locust Grovians, residents of Ednam Forest have declared their political allegiances, too.

“With Jesse Helms as our guide, we resolve to let the people of Zimbabwe work out their own disputes,” the Ednam association said in a news release. “Their anti-Mugabe stance doesn’t really affect us, and even if it did, there is no direct flight from Matabeleland to Charlottesville, so we figure we can avoid a lot of the fallout.”

Speaking through an envoy, Zimbabwe’s Movement for Democratic Change replied, “Thanks a helluva lot.”

With the traditional “too-busy” season upon us, members of the Charlottesville press are expecting a downswing in pronouncements from neighborhood groups. Once the new year turns, however, there is widespread hope that resolutions will be issued regarding Haiti, Cuba, Kashmir and Martha’s Vineyard.—Cathryn Harding