Not even St. Anthony, holy retriever of lost objects, could find Frank Gardner's American Detritus Institute after gentrification's wrecking ball permanently dislocated it from an old building in New Bedford, Massachusetts. St. Tony, however, might turn up Daniel Stupar, the institute's enigmatic archivist.

Stupar is a Providence sculptor who rescues cast-off objects from throwaway bins and trash night piles, remaking them into haphazardly beautiful furniture. At other times, he works these bits and pieces into the art of various imagined personalities.

Frank Gardner, who worked on the Detritus Institute for four years, is one of these creations. During that time, professors, gallery owners, and even a high school art class from Bristol visited this former masterpiece in New Bedford's historic district. But although Gardner recently gave an interview to Metropolis magazine, a journal of architecture and design, no one has ever shaken hands with him. Frank was visible only in his art -- an anti-Santa's workshop that riffed on the planned obsolescence of consumerism.

More recently, Stupar has been overseeing the work of two more of his personalities: Otto, the Prussian mechanic, and Leo, the Romantic poet. Influenced by his creator's interest in the mechanics of failure, emerging artist Otto works away on fixing "what didn't work out" in Stupar's studio. Leo, meanwhile, makes plans for his itinerant shoeshine business and a poetic soapbox from which he hopes to contextualize Stupar's "dissonant, alienating epiphanies " through his own "Gods Must Be Crazy" common sense.

These characters come out of the stimulus of everyday life. "We amalgamate more than we absorb," explains Stupar, as bumper stickers, 24-hour news stations, patriotic lawn decorations, and myriad other objects and messages vie for our attention. The consequent energy is redirected into the artistic output of "people" like Otto and Leo.

While an ironic analysis of the role of personality and celebrity is implicit in these projects, the longevity of their presence and the creation of discretely original works separate Stupar's art personalities from simple performance art. Each artist imposes very different "ecologies," he says, on the second life of "the shrapnel of consumer apocalypse."

Stupar appreciates each of these personalities with the kind of detached investment that writers feel toward repeat characters. Like a classic detective novelist and his detective, Frank, Otto, and Leo mature in parallel, but dissimilar ways to their creator. "I don't let myself know where their stories are going," he says.

With a slightly satirical nod to his work experiences at the Bell and DeCordova

galleries, Stupar now hopes to establish a museum from which he'll curate a revolving one-man, er, multiple personality show.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: December 21 - 27, 2001