,
This story was originally published by City Desk ABQ.
Abducted by aliens? Seen a chupacabra?
The city’s “newest department” is there to field your calls.
The Department of Unexplained Phenomena is part of the exhibit “A Day in the Life II” which opened earlier this month at Gallery One at City Hall. The exhibit features photographs by local artists of city employees at work, but for his piece artist Adrian Pijoan created a fictional department to explore the paranormal.
“I’ve had people ask, ‘is that a real city department,’” he said. “To me, that’s really cool because you’re playing with that boundary between truth and fiction.”
The piece includes an old treasury vault and photographs, one showing the department’s fictional director Dr. Aurora Aura fielding a phone call (perhaps from someone reporting a close encounter?) and another showing a hand entering a code on the vault door.
Visitors can call a number to be directed to a phone directory with several different options. For example, pressing three will yield a list of services the department provides, including alien-abduction experience analysis, Bigfoot behavioral studies, extraterrestrial telepathy tutoring, crop circle decoding, cyberwicca and haunted house parties.
At the end of the narrative, the caller receives a code to open the vault to see a sculpture inside.
Pijoan said he wanted Aura to sound open-minded and have an ability to listen to peoples’ stories without judgment or preconceived notions.
“I wanted her to feel like a city employee,” he said. “She’s not a secret agent or something … she’s a normal person. This is her day job.”
‘Day in and day out’
The larger “A Day in the Life II” exhibit connected artist photographers with city employees “to tell the story of what it is like day in and day out to help provide services for Albuquerque residents, pets and our environment,” said Sherri Brueggemann, the manager of the city’s Public Art Urban Enhancement Division.
She said that about 250 people attended the Jan. 5 grand opening and the show drew 20 to 30 people per day during its first week
The photographers are Max Woltman, Sean Wright, Angel Gil Lopez, Jessica Lozoya, Adrian Martin, Jessica Roybal and Pico del Hierro-Villa.
The photos, taken between July and September show city employees and volunteers mowing a golf course, planting trees, cleaning up graffiti, preparing meals for seniors and more.
Brueggemann said other photos are intended to capture the visual story of the city, including a picture of a residential fence at 10 different times of day to emphasize how the light changes in New Mexico.
For future gallery shows, Brueggemann said, the Art Vault can be tied into a specific exhibition or it can be programmed separately. She said Pijoan’s work was intended to be separate, “but it just serendipitously tied in unexpectedly to the Day in the Life Show with the idea of an imagined government department.”
“(Visitors) are wowed and very surprised by what they find inside,” she said, “and almost everyone says something like, ‘Oh … now I get it! That was a great story!’”
If you go:
The Art Vault is in Gallery One, on the first floor of City Hall. “A Day in the Life II” runs through March 8. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday. More information about the gallery is available here.