Art is where you find it. I found a bunch in a scrapyard a stone’s throw from the Lachine Canal. Not just any scrapyard, but an apocalyptic vision of the green earth at civilization’s end struggling to reclaim what once belonged to it.
This is where Mona Rutenberg is most days, working with hands and tools, seeking a reconciliation between nature and man-made. She is a sculptor, grinding, soldering and welding metal into reflections of a reconstructed world.
Flowers on metal stems with blossoms made of screws and cogs. Metal catkins with a bird sitting on one of them, a twisted creature whose head and beak are fashioned from the pincers of sawed-off pliers. Or more whimsically shaped objects made from blades, levers, handles, drill bits, screws, nails and unidentifiable pieces of iron and steel that once did something. These are Rutenberg’s materials, and all have been discarded, or are perhaps better described as found – by her – and once more made useful.
You begin to see why a scrapyard would be a place where she would feel comfortable. (Don’t call it a junkyard; her landlords would take issue with that term. They call it a storage place).
“Rust is beautiful,” Rutenberg said when we spoke at her atelier. “Rain and time are aging (the metal). It’s got texture. The pieces are sitting on each other, they’ve been dumped, basically … but they merge with the land.”
There’s more to the story, and it lies in Rutenberg’s origins. Hers was a happy childhood divided between a home in Montreal’s N.D.G. neighbourhood and a summer place in the nearby Laurentian hills. She was surrounded by arts and crafts, and her parents encouraged her creativity.
“I was always experimenting with materials, sometimes pulling things out of the woods, sometimes using something commercially made.”
Rutenberg’s interest in sculpture came early on from a dream. “I had broken up with a guy, and I saw him at a restaurant with another woman. It was like a knife piercing my heart.”
That night she had a dream of a sculpture, but she didn’t know how to create it. She set about replicating what her unconscious had projected. She studied for months, learning to make a mold for a complex structure. What resulted was a head and shoulders. “It’s screaming. I’ve got a hand on the side of my face. I still have it.”
So, loss is a muse. It was a larger loss that propelled her to where she is today.
Her father, Jerry, bought and sold industrial steel machinery. “He started in the world of scrap metal and had a large warehouse of dinosaur machines.” Some items he kept in the basement – he was a sculptor and artist in his own right. He encouraged his daughter’s creative bent.
Rutenberg remembers visiting his office. What she experienced stayed with her: “It wasn’t the (visual) aesthetic of the place. It was the smell and the sounds of machines. These experiences get into your being.”
Then, while she was still in her teens, her father killed himself. For the family, it was a terrible and unexpected event. “He was a beautiful person, but clearly troubled. And none of us knew what was going on.”
Of necessity, the life of the family continued. While keeping her creative vision intact, Rutenberg became an art therapist at the Jewish General Hospital. Her sister, Linda, made a career as a fine art photographer, and her brother, Carl, like their father, is in the machinery business. Her mother, who died last year, met a man she stayed with for over 25 years, joining him in his work exporting lines of clothing from Montreal factories to the Caribbean and other islands.
Mona left her day job in 2014 to pursue sculpturing full time. Besides her metal works, she also creates figurative and multi-media pieces. She’s had to learn to manage her art as a business, splitting her time between working for commissions and gallery sales. With the commissions, she said, she promotes a collaborative process with clients.
Is it working out? “My standards are never fully met. It could go better. I have a few goals to achieve, but then you let go of that and let the journey unfold.”
For a while, Rutenberg worked out of a rental space in an N.D.G. garage. Then city inspectors showed up to say what she was doing was not up to code in that neighbourhood. It sent her on a search for new digs and brought her to an industrial patch on the Lachine Canal that has not yet given way to condos. Two brothers who owned the lot knew her father. A deal was struck. She rented a shed and fixed it up to create an oasis of order amid the surrounding chaos.
“I’m at home here,” Rutenberg said. “Yeah, it’s messy, but it’s out there. This is my turf in here. If my Dad was alive, maybe he would have a place like this.”
See more of Rutenberg’s work at: www.monarutenberg.ca
Fascinating what sparks the creative fires and how the Rutenberg family drew strength from tragedy
Fascinating family link to Mona’s beautifully creative woman-made art out of recycled materials.
Reminds me of Françoise Sullivan’s story who gave up dancing for welding sculptures in her garage while her children were young & needing her care.