His Room As He Left It is an alternate world in sculpture that tells the coming of age story of Drey Fank, a 21-year old boy from the imaginary town of Sparkleton, Pennsylvania. When finished, 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. The viewer will be invited to page through the diary and gently peruse the room to piece together the story of Drey's life. He wanders the abandoned pencil factory and hangs out at the petrified crash-landed flying saucer off Route 918. He and his fellow citizens hunt songbirds for food, and out of simple honesty he stuffs and mounts them exactly as he found them in Death. His favorite dish is chickadees with cheese. He smokes Oak Smokes cigarettes and eats Rabbit Rinds chips. He is shy, naïve, and apathetic, and he kills time with his friends until a series of events – beginning with the diner grease fire – spark a lust for life, whereupon he leaves home for Erie and the Unknown.

The contents of the room relate life in his world, which is between ours and another. The passengers of the stranded UFO have long since bred with the locals. Everyone gets along. These and other absurdities express my ideas: Perfection is functionality, not flawlessness; utopia is subjective and cannot exist. Paradox is inherent. Atrophy is inevitable. Live before you die. Animals R Us.

All of the objects in His Room As He Left It are handmade with mixed media between 2004 and now.

http://hisroomasheleftit.blogspot.com/

This windowSPACE is made available to the community by Joe Blumenthal through storefrontART, a program of Commonwealth Center for Change. To submit work to storefrontART check out our posts in the Opportunity Share.