From a short distance away, one pauses to watch it poking abruptly from the horizon of the Belmont neighborhood, crisscrossed bands of red-and-white steel jutting and then tapering skyward in a sleek ascent to a fine tip. It bristles with pinnacles along its dozens of joints, and though it’s topped with blinking strobes and red warning lights, it resembles nothing so much as a 13th-century Gothic spire soaring heavenward. Its brother and sister spires loom off to the east above Love Circle, while its grandest, most elegant cousin graces the fields near the Concord Road-Brentwood exit off I-65. Though these structures are only transmission towers, they nonetheless possess a haunting aesthetic beauty, and they demand an interpretation beyond the merely functional.

I have stood near Hillsboro Village on many a night, astonished at the sheer spectacle of this Belmont spire marking the rise of a full ivory moon or emerging from the gray, blurry mists of autumn and winter rain. (Believe me, I’m not alone in this.) At such times, it’s easy to dream, to ignore its role as an emergency communications tower. Although it would be more attractive clothed in another color or covered in gold leaf, it never ceases to appeal to the senses or to interact with the light and space around it. It’s a landmark and a beacon, a simple marvel of engineering—a poised, feminine framework of lines that’s as powerful and sweeping as those masculine masses that comprise the skyscrapers downtown. If you care about the aesthetic landscape of a city, you can’t help but engage in these kinds of observations.

If you engage in these kinds of observations, and you’ve driven through Hillsboro Village near 21st and Magnolia in the past two months, perhaps you’ve noticed what a friend of mine calls “that droopy Erector Set Thing.” It sits on a swatch of property, flanked by two middle-aged magnolias; behind it is the charcoal-colored south wall of the building occupied by entrepreneur Joel Solomon and by Village Real Estate Services. Solomon, who owns the building, commissioned his friend, New York artist Holton Rower, to create a work of sculpture tailored to the site.

Rower is heavily involved both with recycling materials in his artwork and with creating site-specific installations; Solomon is deeply committed both to preserving the character of the Hillsboro neighborhood and to pushing for more local patronage of public art. The result of this collaboration is a silver-gray structure that evokes the form of the nearby Belmont tower and engages in its own quirky dialogue with other visual elements in the area, including lampposts, telephone poles, trees, and bits of architecture. Rower has given it a rather dorky name—“Church of Sculpture”—but he has succeeded in assembling a whimsical, intriguing piece that will surely gather ardent admirers and passionate detractors alike. It’s much more sophisticated than Olin Calk’s “Canyon Cowboys,” and it raises the aesthetic level of local public sculpture ventures to a higher plane.

The artist salvaged heaps of steel shelving brackets from a Dixon junkyard and bolted them together during an intensive four-day period this fall. The result is a 23-foot-high linear network of odd angles and open spaces; the whole mass rests on three sturdy legs at the bottom and bends at the top as if stooping over. From some vantages, the sculpture has the extreme S-curve of a wriggling snake or a long-necked beast; Solomon says an acquaintance described it as “a runaway power pylon.”

Indeed, the sculpture does appear to be moving somewhere, as if cognizant of the fact that it looks somewhat awkward and hemmed in on the site. Even so, it’s a pleasant shock to see something there in the first place. The “Church” has all the breezy qualities of a low-art Eiffel Tower made from Popsicle sticks, yet the artist’s sensitivity to materials and his grasp of the raw, dramatic gesture suggest an aspiration to fine-art status. The work humbly joins in with our skyline of transmission towers, church steeples, and the gleaming shaft of the new arena—all architectural icons that make Nashville the unique place that it is—yet its lack of rigidity and scale playfully mocks these structures too. If a plan for nighttime illumination actually materializes, the sculpture will only further add to the sense of place that makes the Hillsboro Village neighborhood so special. Given the artist’s growing reputation, it may even become a significant public artwork. By all means, get out of your car and take a closer look, then imagine the greenspace along Magnolia or the “Avenue of the arts” filled with other kinds of sculptures.

Rower isn’t the only artist to exhibit locally a thought-provoking piece made from recycled materials. Since September, the south side of TPAC’s Jackson Hall lobby has been graced by a huge figure suspended from the ceiling, courtesy of Knoxville-area artist Andy Saftel. In this case, the Visual Outreach Program of the Tennessee State Museum is the patron, and the TSM, like Joel Solomon, is to be commended for taking risks to advance the cause of public art. In the display, Saftel has several drawings of images that resemble salvage from the scrap yard of his mind, but the real focal point is his 25-foot-long figure, entitled “Serenade the Procession.” Backed on one side by a deep-blue wall and on the other by the stippled texture of cement blocks, the work is not easy to view, but it rewards a patient effort.

The body is essentially a giant outline of welded steel strips, while the limbs are filled with assorted materials taken from the junk heap. It’s great fun to spot the rusted toys, gears, glass bottles, vessels, even a softball and license plate, jammed inside the sculpture’s ample length. Within the head is a motor and one of several dolls and carved figures; the heart contains a battered clock reposing upon a child’s skate. Moving to a frontal view, one sees that the figure is playing a tiny guitar and singing; the overall mix of poignancy, clumsiness, and decay stimulates a complex set of associations in the viewer, not the least of which is the intricate messiness of the creative process itself. It’s worth noting that this larger-than-life figure resembles one of Saftel’s drawings nearby—it’s as if the image has escaped from its frame and is flying away, an Icarus on rusted wings rushing toward the light outside.

Saftel says his work is “a tribute to all people who add something to the procession of life to enhance our collective experience...a tribute to their creative and generous gift to the world.” How appropriate these lofty sentiments and this work are for this particular space! If only we could see more of examples of these sentiments in our midst—as Rower observes, “Nashville [is] starving for public art.”

Solomon, for his part, says that he wants to display more artworks at his office and at other sites in the Hillsboro neighborhood. “These houses are part of such a unique place,” he acknowledges. “We need to keep them from being bulldozed for more office buildings.” Indeed, it should be self-evident that public art is just as important to this city’s identity as sports arenas, theme eateries, or spectacular hotels. The public and private sector have worked together famously to provide us these last three things—how about bringing more public art into our lives?