Art with a cause

Local sculptor creates a Sept. 11 tribute

Robert Perless believes search and rescue dogs are not only real heroes but angels as well.
"Imagine someone being caught, trapped, unable to help themselves and the first face they see is a canine, an angel, your dream come true," explains Perless, a Greenwich-based sculptor.
Using his imagination and his artistic skills, he has recaptured that feeling in his new work that is to be included in the DOGNY sculpture project, sponsored by the American Kennel Club and the AKC Canine Animal Recovery. There are about 300 decorated dog sculptures expected to be displayed throughout New York City when the project is unveiled Aug. 19. The project is a tribute to the search and rescue dogs who plied the rubble of the World Trade Center site following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in search of human remains.
Each sculpture is being financed through donated sponsorships and will be sold in November through an auction held by the Sotheby's auction house. The proceeds will be used by the AKC for buying, maintaining and training search and rescue dogs, and to defray the costs incurred by the volunteers who came to New York from around the world to help in the recovery effort. The recovery effort was helped by Perless' close friend and dog trainer, Chris Onthank, who worked the site with one of his search dogs. "It really touches close to home," Perless says.
"I train my dog, Montana, in AKC obedience, agility, and also as a service dog, because I am hearing impaired," says Perless, who's trained Doberman pinschers for nearly 25 years.
Severe nerve damage in both ears makes it difficult for Perless to understand speech and hear high-pitched sounds. Perless blames his condition from exposure to the noise of the grinding tools he's been using in his work since the 1960s. Perless's dog Montana is trained to nudge the sculptor's leg when the telephone rings or when someone comes up the driveway. He also shows the dog in obedience competitions.
Despite his closeness to his canine helper, Perless couldn't use him as a model when DOGNY gave him the cast for the sculpture in June. Perless says that envisioned the German shepherd cast as "an angel of rescue." He covered his model with Fiberglas and holographic aluminum material. Perless says the materials radiate the energy of the sun and projects shifting rainbows. He named the sculpture Aurora. "Because it's about light like the Aurora borealis. It kind of just jumped out at me, I just knew," says Perless.
Aurora is scheduled to appear on an undisclosed street in New York City on Aug. 19 through mid-November.
Using the same materials he used for "Aurora", as well as other metals and prisms, Perless creates massive kinetic metal sculptures that interact with light for installation outdoors and in various atriums. He focuses on movement, by moving light and sometimes even having his pieces move physically. Some of his outdoor sculptures can be seen at Syracuse International Airport, Salt Lake Community College, University of Connecticut at Storrs and at the Rusk Institute in New York City
"My work is really about what you don't see, the energy latent in the world itself. This power constantly surrounds us, yet we walk right past in our daily lives," says Perless, who studied art and engineering at the University of Miami in Florida. "I manipulate light by breaking it down into the spectrum and projecting it throughout the environment. When light strikes the prisms which form the structural members of my work, they retract brilliant moving rainbows."
Ever since he began his artist career in 1970, Perless enjoys working on a large scale. His work can be as small as 20 feet in size and as expansive as 175 feet in length. And when working on such a enormous scale, the sculpture takes time to complete ? sometimes at least six months.
For that he has help. For 15 years, Stephen O'Brien of Old Greenwich has worked with Perless.
Perless's studio is part of a remarkable steel and aluminum complex he created in 1982.
He lives there with wife, Ellen Kaplan, a poet and advertising writer. Perless says that his wife and him were city kids who never expected to move until Greenwich seemed to call out to them. He needed a bigger space to fulfill his quest to create a dream studio and that's when he discovered Greenwich.
He describes his neighborhood as "a marvelous, warm, loving, neighborhood that we lacked in New York. (So) I decided to live here and make it my home." Perless says his surroundings influence his work. "(I am) so much more in tuned with nature. You have it all year and when I'm done at the end of the day, I take my dog for a walk in the woods. Now I see things that would have been invisible to me before."
Enjoying the outdoors includes sailing for Perless and his wife and it was during a two-year sailing sojourn from the Canadian Maritimes to the Caribbean Ocean in the early 1970s that inspired him to start creating wind-driven work.
His latest project is his impression of a double helix in the atrium of Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City. It will stand nearly 180 feet tall. Perless says the piece will be in perfect view from nearby balconies where patients will be able to see it and the rainbows that it will create. His goal with the helix, says Perless "(is) to use a universal language, connecting scientists, doctors and patients."
Even though his dog sculpture "Aurora" is miniscule in comparison, Perless says he hopes it will raise awareness and money for search and rescue dogs.
And, says Perless, to show that "an angel does not have to have wings."