In a nondescript office just off Millbrook Road, there stands a 7-foot-tall beast built of secondhand computer monitors, washed-up motherboards and picked-apart keyboards - a towering elephant constructed by Joe Carnevale, creator of Raleigh's famous Barrel Monster.
Its tail is fashioned from power cords, wrapped into a braid. Its legs are sculpted from discarded computer shells, stacked on a pallet and sturdy enough to shake.
Its trunk is fabricated from old speakers, each the size of a softball, molded into a giant curlicue.
And behind the cybernetic pachyderm, a snow shovel sits full of droppings made from old cooling fans.
"It was a bit of a challenge working with that stuff," said Carnevale, a history major at N.C. State University. "I had to take the speakers apart, screw them together and then reassemble them."
The most interesting thing about Carnevale's elephant, though, is its origin.
For the past five years, the North Raleigh nonprofit agency Purple Elephant has taken donated computers, rebuilt them and delivered them free to needy children in boys and girls clubs. What the agency couldn't upgrade, it recycled, making a bit of cash to run the operation.
What the agency needed, though, was some exposure. Carnevale, meanwhile, needed some charity work.
Last spring, you may remember, he found nationwide notoriety for scavenging a few orange traffic barrels from a construction zone on Hillsborough Street and shaping them into a giant, fang-toothed beast.
Found, arrested and convicted, Carnevale became an immediate guerrilla artist-hero, being interviewed on National Public Radio and winning support even from the company that owned the barrels.
Still, to clear his record, he had to work 50 hours of community service.
Head always popping with ideas, Purple Elephant's director Dave Hinton figured Carnevale's name would lend the perfect publicity. Here was an offbeat charity tucked away off the Glenwood Avenue strip, chock full of ancient IBMs, keyboards stacked like cord-wood, volunteers tinkering with them like Christmas elves.
"I thought, 'We got all these parts, and he has a cult following,'" Hinton said.
Contacted by Purple Elephant in October, Carnevale jumped.
"You're a nonprofit?" he said. "Perfect!"
So for the next few weeks, he sorted through the pile of hardware, bending motherboards to form the beast's curved back, making a mouth out of an open CD drive. He would pace around the animal, select some unlikely objects from the pile and slowly fit them into place.
Today, Carnevale's creation looks as if an oversized, trunked mammal covered in glue took a roll inside the Dumpster behind an out-of-business Circuit City.
"We have a pallet out back, and we gave him free rein," said Faye Sinclair, a volunteer, reading labels down the elephant's haunches. "That's a Dell, that's an eMachine, that's an IBM, that's an HP ...."
Carnevale's elephant can't really stay outside, but he'll likely show up at fundraisers. Maybe Purple Elephant will sell little nameplates that donors can affix to an elephant part. Or maybe, Sinclair said, there's a Name-The-Elephant Contest coming soon.
Whatever happens, the idea that art can spring from the mundane, or the garbage, thrives in Purple Elephant's humble office.
The only thing missing, but not for long, is a coat of purple paint.
