Close encounters Artist Sam Van Aken re-creates life of character in epic Spielberg film in new work

One builds cities. The other moves mountains. One has a shoe fetish. The other is obsessed with Devil’s Tower.

Though Wally Warren and Sam Van Aken use similar materials, their approach to art couldn’t be more different. Their concurrent shows at the University of Maine department of art Carnegie Galleries, on view through March 18, explore this dichotomy.

Van Aken isn’t one to make mountains out of molehills. He prefers to make them out of trash cans, chicken wire and papier-mache. Or mashed potatoes.

For the last year and a half, the 32-year-old University of Maine sculpture professor has re-created the life of Roy Neary, the character Richard Dreyfuss played in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” In the movie, Neary’s search for alien life leads him on a bizarre quest to Devil’s Tower National Monument. It also destroys his family life, his job and his sanity.

In the summer of 2003, Van Aken retraced Roy Neary’s journey from Indiana to Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming. Pictures from the journey are on view in “Becoming,” the first phase of a larger installation. Van Aken imitated poses from “Close Encounters,” and displays the photographs beside corresponding film stills. There also are piles of rocks and video displays throughout the gallery.

But the centerpiece is a replica of Neary’s living room in the film, complete with Budweiser cans, a vintage lamp, and a 1977 episode of “Days of Our Lives” on the television. Like Neary, Van Aken is in the process of building a papier-mache mountain in the middle of the room.

“Becoming” started as a commentary on the way media pervade our lives. The more involved he became with the project, the more he began to reflect on his Quixotic life as an artist, and how it paralleled Neary’s.

“I go into tremendous debt, my interpersonal relationships suffer, and I become obsessed,” Van Aken said, laughing.

“It’s like I’m a bad character in a movie,” added Van Aken, whose work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe. “Wait, I am a bad character in a movie. I find these scrap materials around the home and construct these weird visions.”

Of these weird visions, the “Close Encounters” project has been the most all-encompassing. For a year, he literally became Roy Neary, adopting his mannerisms, wearing 1970s clothes to class, even faking the sunburn Neary got during a power surge at the beginning of the film.

But in the end, it was just a re-creation. Even though his video was of the highest quality, and his photographs were printed on the finest paper, it was obviously not the real thing.

“No matter what I do or how I do it, it never comes out like the real thing. It’s always an inadequate substitute. My mashed potatoes are never as good as his.”

It was a hard lesson for Van Aken.

“I’m obsessive about how I work, as far as my other sculptures, I’m really meticulous, really compulsive. If I can’t do it, I set it aside, but I can’t do that with this,” he said. “His obsession in the movie is about this tower, this form. My obsession came to be with the re-creation.”

For Wally Warren, whose found-object cities, totems and wall-hangings in “Chaos” serve as a colorful foil to Van Aken’s visions, the obsession is with reclamation. When he started building “model cities” as a boy, Warren used scraps of plywood, balsa and wire. Today, he populates his cities with toys and lighters, circuits and computer keys, which serve as landmarks in his miniature landscapes.

“The obsessiveness goes hand in hand with the tactile quality to me,” Warren, 58, said. “It’s a paradox. On the one hand, I’m attracted to all this stuff. It’s fascinating visually to me. The [computer parts are] color coded, cryptic. All of the insignia to me is very fascinating. It’s like a language.”

Warren, a self-described Luddite, lives in a cabin in the woods of Ripley. Though he studied engineering for a semester at UMaine, that was a disaster, so he turned to art instead. It fed his fascination with architecture, and in the three decades since he graduated, his assemblages have attracted a loyal, adoring following.

His work has been included in many Percent for Art projects, including the “City of Dreams” that adorns the State House in Augusta, and his sculptures are in private collections throughout the country.

Warren’s sculptures speak to “resurrection, transformation and the fascination with objects.” His totems, some 10 feet tall, are shingled with hundreds of toes from high-heeled shoes, a coat of shorn inner tubes, or vinyl records arranged like fish scales. The colorful arcs in his “House Shards” series are made from wood scraps he amassed while building his cabin. This is the way he has worked for decades.

“It was an environmental thing before there was an environmental movement,” Warren said.

He counts Third-World folk art, the work of Blackie Langlais, and the collage and assemblage of Arman among his influences, but his vibrant style is truly his own.

“I like to err on the side of overabundance,” he said, “to fill everything, to just cram everything in.”

“Becoming” and “Chaos” are on view through March 18 at the University of Maine Department of Art Carnegie Galleries on the Orono campus. Gallery hours are 9am to 4pm weekdays. For more information, call MaJo Keleshian at 581-3267. Kristen Andresen can be reached at 990-8287 and kandresen@bangordailnyews.net.