Local Northern Virginia resident up-cycles Pez dispensers into art

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Perhaps it’s appropriate that Karen Rexrode creates her work in a studio owned by the Center for the Arts at the Candy Factory, and that it’s displayed in a gallery called Art a La Carte.

Many of her pieces begin with the edible. Or, at least, a vehicle for the edible.

The Loudoun County resident is an assemblage artist. She puts together unrelated items — such as parts of old toys and other, well, junk — to form three-
dimensional compositions. And the most popular of those are altered Pez dispensers.

The candy-distributing plastic contraptions are manufactured to depict pop-culture characters, but Rexrode fashions them into new figures by using air-drying clay and odds and ends that come from thrift stores, friends and other sources.

For example, a pig Pez dispenser sits on a shelf in Rexrode’s studio just outside Manassas. The porker, wearing a bow tie and perched on his rear end with his front legs outstretched, seems almost jolly.

But he had a more sinister air in his former life.

“He was Dracula before,” said Rexrode, who pointed out the swine’s only remaining link to the macabre: a small skull on his bow tie.

Rexrode, 60, said she has been interested in art since she was a young girl.

After closing the plant nursery business she owned for 25 years, she got into photography, following in the footsteps of her father, who was a photographer for the CIA.

Rexrode had her photos displayed in two galleries — the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton and ArtBeat in Manassas — but she kept thinking about moving to three-dimensional pieces.

Then she discovered the assemblage work of Michael deMeng, an artist from Vancouver, B.C.

“I was just totally smitten,” Rexrode said.

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