Laura Holland Photo

Oak Smokes cigarettes (colored pencil, ink and acrylic, aluminum leaf, silverpoint, cellophane, handmade paper and oak leaves)

  MEDIA: Photo Gallery »

Ariel Kotker reveals her work in progress, in her Northampton studio and on the Web, as an exploration in alternative realities. "'His Room As He Left It' is an alternate world in sculpture that tells the coming-of-age story of Drey Fank, a twenty-one-year-old boy from the imaginary town of Sparkleton, Pennsylvania. When finished," she continues, "it will be a walk-in novella where everything is handmade, including stuffed birds, beer cans, a bass guitar, a birding gun, old sneakers and a personal diary."

Kotker invites the viewer to page through Drey's (totally fictitious) diary, handle the (completely fabricated) objects left behind, and piece together the story of a life richly conjured through craft. As she emphasizes, it's a story. "What" and "how" are the relatively easy questions, though there's nothing facile about her time-consuming process of crafting the many individual sculptures that comprise the installation. More elusive issues are involved in the "who" and "why." Understanding the intertwined "where" and "when" of Sparkleton is the key to it all.

Drey is imaginary, but even an incomplete inventory of items ranging from miniscule to over-life-sized in "His Room As He Left It" helps introduce him and his world. The matchbook (made with colored pencil, gouache, paper, cardboard, sandpaper, wire, and pigmented ash) and the pack of Oak Smokes cigarettes (colored pencil, ink and acrylic, aluminum leaf, silverpoint, cellophane, handmade paper, and oak leaves) hint at a world of happy illusion because "Everyone smokes Oaks in Sparkleton, and smoking is not bad for you—because it's an imaginary world."

Some of the mixed media pieces are uncannily realistic. Kotker reports that her mother had to stop herself from scooping up the waxed, shaped, inked and painted paper coffee cup and tossing it in the trash. But others are artistic interpretations, like the sculpture modeled on an antique wooden fingerjoint box that she constructed of binder's board, with wood grain rendered in luscious "Technicolor" thanks to Prismacolor pencil.

Drey's lucky rabbit's foot is actually wire, plastic, air-dry clay, aluminum leaf, and milkweed tassels, although Kotker initially considered cat fur. "I get really excited about materials," she admits. Holding the handmade, hand-painted box of hand-filed, hand-folded paperclips and the corduroy pants fashioned of close to a thousand strands of yarn glued to linen, she wonders: "Why am I doing this? I guess I'm just motivated to do things the hard way." Her attention to crafting minor details is a major commitment; the work gains validity from her passion for reinventing even its slightest components.

Similarly laborious are hand-lettered texts—in effect, drawings—of Drey's diary, newspapers and a screenplay. "It hurt my hand but I enjoyed it so much," says Kotker. "It's the same as the thousand pieces of yarn on the pants. The handmade quality brings something to the object."

Sometimes hand fabrication brings surprises and possibilities. Drey's high-top sneakers (foam, rubber, canvas, acrylics, polymer clay, woven string, ink and colored pencil) turned out way too big, she acknowledges: "I miscalculated. I could ditch them and make another pair, or I could say it's part of the plan because the character is larger than life, or I could somehow work it into the story." Maybe Drey could have a late growth spurt, and, as they say, grow into his feet? "Actually, he is having a late growth spurt," agrees Kotker, "not physically, but mentally."

So who is Drey Fank? Enchanted by his fabricated possessions, we're intrigued by his fictitious self. "The characters are drawn from people I know myself," says Kotker. "One of my models [for the character of Drey] faces serious medical stuff, but maintains his naïveté and hope. He is full speed ahead with optimism, even with everything working against him." She notes that Drey is painfully shy—"Right on for me!"—but another character, Alexandra Tropine, has a very different, hard-driving personality. Alexandra, who moves to Sparkleton from the outside world, is a taxidermist. Drey works for her, and as the plot thickens, she becomes the catalyst that propels him towards his loss of innocence and the outside world.

"Taxidermy is really big in Pennsylvania because hunting is really huge. The first day of hunting season is even a school holiday," Kotker says. Most taxidermists pose animals as glorified trophies for display, she says, but Drey's style of taxidermy is as straightforward as his character. He stuffs songbirds, like the chickadee and the tufted titmouse, stricken at their moment of death. "He doesn't seek to make anything what it's not," Kotker explains. "He takes everything at face value, but has to learn that's not the way the real world works." (In an intriguing interplay of illusions, the objects left behind in his room appear to be what they are not: rabbit's fur is really milk weed; a maple leaf is manufactured from paper and wire; pencils are papier maché, wood putty and embossed aluminum, and so on.)

Kotker talks about Drey's optimism and naïveté, but he also seems to bring a sense of literal innocence and innocent literalness to the world he encounters. And this world is not only imaginary, but also totally unreal. Kotker pauses: "Did I mention the flying saucer? No?" It's crucial for understanding Sparkleton, and there's even a hand-painted postcard of it among Drey's possessions. Several generations back, Kotker explains, a spaceship crashed into the woods outside Sparkleton. "It's now viewed as part of the landscape—in fact, it's petrified and people visit it for picnics. The aliens interbred with the local population, and that makes Sparkleton what it is today. ... I am better at telling stories through artwork than through words," she comments, although this hardly does justice to the character and charm that speak through Drey's diary entries ("Why do trees have to smell so good?").

With words and artwork, illusion and reality, Kotker explains that "Sparkleton is a self-contained place. People come and go, but they don't go very far. One place they go is the nearby town of Beam, a typical post-industrial town, where the worst of human nature can emerge, unlike Sparkleton, where nothing bad ever happens. It's a safe place." Thus Sparkleton is both imaginary and totally unreal, while Beam could be real, even though it's not.

"Sparkleton is based on myself as a kid. I was curious about everything, but not really entirely accepting of possibilities of evil," she says. Imagine—or recall—how it feels to discover for the first time that someone actually intends to hurt you: it's devastating. "It shatters your world," she continues. "I see the project as an acceptance of the bad in the world and as an attempt to accept the world as it is. Sparkleton is an extension of myself, a portrait of my own late-blooming self."

Kotker was born in Manhattan and moved with her family to Northampton when she was ten, so she has no personal roots in rural Pennsylvania. The region, however, provides the background she needs to ground Sparkleton in the real and the unreal world. In 2004, she stayed in Titusville, Pennsylvania to research the project and gather first-hand impressions, and she was also inspired by the shadows of life and death on the landscape of a nearby ghost town, Pit Hole City, "an oil boom town with a five-hundred-day existence," she says.

Another inspiration for the project comes from museum displays of the room of so-and-so, filled with personal belongings and period furnishings. "But then there's the velvet rope," sighs Kotker, which keeps viewers outside, looking in. "I always wanted to go inside that velvet rope. The project is about being enveloped in another world. And sometimes it's not enough just to visit; you need to take a piece of that world with you."

She hopes that viewers will visit this alternate world and take away something from the work, but not quite as literally as the person who walked off with the sculpture of the nail (made of air-dry clay and wire) from her show last fall at the Northampton Center for the Arts. Undeterred, she continues to welcome viewers inside the velvet rope and wants "not to make people uneasy in any way." It's difficult to imagine this engaging work causing any unease, except for reminding us that, like Drey Fank, we eventually leave the imagined world behind.