‘It was my secret project’: Easthampton artist’s exhibit at A.P.E. Gallery is a ‘waiting room between life and death’

In the middle of downtown Northampton is the abandoned bedroom of a young man who went over a waterfall in a barrel. Drew Fank, 19, thought he’d find a sort of rebirth. Maybe he did. It’s hard to say. But what we do know is what he left behind — a taxidermied songbird, a diary, a dead plant and other assorted items scattered around his bedroom.

Fank, however, is not real. His room is part of an art exhibition in Northampton, and everything in his room, from the frame of his bed to the beads on a keychain, was handmade by Easthampton artist Ariel Kotker, who calls the room “a waiting room between life and death.”

A.P.E. Gallery will host the joint show “There Goes the Neighborhood/His Room As He Left It” through Sunday, Aug. 2, with an opening reception on Friday, July 10, from 5 to 8 p.m.

Kotker first came up with the idea for her show 22 years ago after she witnessed a family member’s death and became manic.

“Secretly, I was putting up fake band flyers around Boston, with fake venues and everything. It was my secret project. It was really fun, and I realized I wanted to make an entire room for one kid who was in all these fake bands,” Kotker said.

The idea for “His Room As He Left It” came to her fully formed over the course of one day, and since then, she said, it’s been “a labor of love.”

“I’m still writing his diary,” Kotker said. “I think I’ll always be writing his diary, always changing it.”

The narrative about Fank is that he lived in the imaginary town of Sparkleton, Pennsylvania, where residents killed songbirds for sustenance with slingshots. He liked to smoke cigarettes, wander around an abandoned pencil factory and visit a crash-landed unidentified flying object. After the local diner catches fire, Fank gets into a bar fight and decides to leave town, leaving so many of his possessions — even some of his clothing — behind.

As much as Kotker wants people to appreciate her work, the show isn’t meant to be interactive.

“This stuff is more fragile than it looks,” she said.

When she’s hosted other iterations of the show elsewhere, she’s had her fake trash tossed out. “I had to make new fake trash, and someone switched on the amp and broke the knob, so I had to reglue the knob,” she said. “It’s very touching — pun intended — that people interact with the work in that way.” Kotker laughed as she recalled a friend joking that she was lucky no one had tried to move into the realistic space yet.

Instead, Kotker would prefer if people “just came with their emotions,” she said.

“People bring their grief because it’s a room of someone who’s gone. I didn’t set out to make it like that, but it turns out that a lot of people do bring their grief, so I want to offer sort of a respite zone for that, if that’s what they need,” she said.

“There Goes the Neighborhood” is about lawns — and it’s set up such that it functions as the de facto “lawn” of “His Room As He Left It.” In “There Goes the Neighborhood,” squares of artificial turf sit atop columns of different heights. Each section of grass has a green army man action figure fighting an “enemy” of the perfect lawn — a mole, a fairy ring, dandelions and fallen leaves.

Artist Judith Klausner, who lives in Somerville, wanted to reflect the ways in which lawn maintenance is a microcosm of systems of violence and control. She took inspiration from television commercials that promoted lawn care with the language of violence and war. For instance, “Our enemy will feel the bite of our iron. Kill them!” Klausner also wanted to explore how lawn care is gendered: as she put it, “Lawns are to gardening what grilling is to cooking.”

Unlike “His Room As He Left It,” “There Goes the Neighborhood” will have an interactive element: a fenced-in “lawn” where “frolicking is very much encouraged,” Klausner said. Guests will also be able to decorate it with paper leaves they create themselves at the show.

Klausner and Kotker didn’t know each other before A.P.E. paired them for the show, but now, the two are good friends, they both said. They’ve been able to connect over a shared artistic sense: both artists’ pieces in this show combine realism and fantasy in a way that also puts them in conversation with each other.

“I like that feeling when you’re coming out of a movie and you need to readjust your sense of reality, and I think that’s a magical feeling,” Kotker said. “I just try to offer that.”

Admission to the show is free. A.P.E. Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. and Friday from noon to 8 p.m.