How do you know a place exists? Because you can find it on a map or google it? You see its name emblazoned on a sweatshirt, or written on a souvenir in someone's kitchen? Perhaps you hear it referenced in conversation, or maybe you've met someone who grew up there. Just how a community exists and how it produces artifacts are central questions for novelist and Champlain College associate professor of writing Erik Esckilsen. To explore that question, he created a fictional community. Recently opened at the Champlain College Art Gallery, an exhibition called "Quality of Life: The Ralston Historical Museum" uncannily conjures the life and times of a city close to Esckilsen's heart: Burlington's island neighbor, Ralston, which doesn't exist. "I think of [the exhibition] as a spatial story," Esckilsen said. Curated by Jane Adams, a Champlain MFA candidate in emergent media, and gallery director Dana Heffern, the show proffers a bevy of Ralston "artifacts." They range from a lacquered Japanese tea set purportedly gifted by Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen, to stereoscopic historical images, to a Ralston-branded windshield scraper. Displayed on pedestals or in Plexiglas cases and accompanied by descriptive labels, these relics are presented precisely as they might be in a real museum. A pictorial timeline of Ralston's history spans the gallery's northern wall, beginning in 1837 with the logging Thibodeau brothers and ending in 2015 with the election of Zora Dardas, the city's second female mayor. "[Ralston] is a city that's constantly trying to out-Burlington Burlington," Esckilsen said. "[It] tries to be more liberal than Burlington." A monitor plays a short documentary about the origins of the town's brewery, and an interactive map invites visitors to tie their memories of Ralston to precise locations on the island. This transmedia approach will reward visitors who pay close attention; from the various forms of representation, narrative threads begin to emerge. For a chronicle of a fictional place, the Ralston Historical Museum is shockingly comprehensive. But what end does all this mimicry of real life and real history serve? In that respect, Ralston has dual lives: as the setting for a novel and as a teaching tool. The seeds of Ralston were planted during Esckilsen's sabbatical in the fall of 2014. Influenced by the work of media scholar Henry Jenkins, Esckilsen began to dive into "storytelling as world-building," he said. A former journalist (who…
How do you know a place exists? Because you can find it on a map or google it? You see its name emblazoned on a sweatshirt, or written on a souvenir in someone's kitchen? Perhaps you hear it referenced in conversation, or maybe you've met someone who grew up there. Just how a community exists and how it produces artifacts are central questions for novelist and Champlain College associate professor of writing Erik Esckilsen. To explore that question, he created a fictional community. Recently opened at the Champlain College Art Gallery, an exhibition called "Quality of Life: The Ralston Historical Museum" uncannily conjures the life and times of a city close to Esckilsen's heart: Burlington's island neighbor, Ralston, which doesn't exist. "I think of [the exhibition] as a spatial story," Esckilsen said. Curated by Jane Adams, a Champlain MFA candidate in emergent media, and gallery director Dana Heffern, the show proffers a bevy of Ralston "artifacts." They range from a lacquered Japanese tea set purportedly gifted by Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen, to stereoscopic historical images, to a Ralston-branded windshield scraper. Displayed on pedestals or in Plexiglas cases and accompanied by descriptive labels, these relics are presented precisely as they might be in a real museum. A pictorial timeline of Ralston's history spans the gallery's northern wall, beginning in 1837 with the logging Thibodeau brothers and ending in 2015 with the election of Zora Dardas, the city's second female mayor. "[Ralston] is a city that's constantly trying to out-Burlington Burlington," Esckilsen said. "[It] tries to be more liberal than Burlington." A monitor plays a short documentary about the origins of the town's brewery, and an interactive map invites visitors to tie their memories of Ralston to precise locations on the island. This transmedia approach will reward visitors who pay close attention; from the various forms of representation, narrative threads begin to emerge. For a chronicle of a fictional place, the Ralston Historical Museum is shockingly comprehensive. But what end does all this mimicry of real life and real history serve? In that respect, Ralston has dual lives: as the setting for a novel and as a teaching tool. The seeds of Ralston were planted during Esckilsen's sabbatical in the fall of 2014. Influenced by the work of media scholar Henry Jenkins, Esckilsen began to dive into "storytelling as world-building," he said. A former journalist (who…