Hot metal burns in Pittsburgh

Artists Carley Jean Parrish and Ed Parrish witnessed their Etna home and studio burn to the ground on January 17. They lost all the work they had made for “Hot Metal,” a new exhibition organized by Ed Parrish and planned for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s largest Downtown gallery SPACE. The Tribune-Reveiw art critic Kurt Shaw reports that “with no insurance, the Parrishes are now hard at work rebuilding their lives. But they did manage to pull together that art exhibition. The show must go on as they say. And they even managed to put their own work in it, though quite a bit different than planned….’My wife and I were both planning on having our work in the show, but most of what we were working on got destroyed (in the fire),’ Ed Parrish said. ‘So, these are parts that we scavenged from our studio. Then, a week after the fire, which kept us up all night, we just stayed up all night down here and built this through the course of the night.’ So devastated, Carley Jean Parrish could barely muster any more effort. Her ‘Extensions’ is sad and poignant commentary, being simply a wad of melted extension chords hung on a hook near the entrance to the gallery.” Read more.