Buildings are rarely considered to have personas.  In fact, each individual building is different from another, just as every person is different.  The design, the materials, the location, even the color of paint all contribute to what kind of personality that particular building will have.  Is it a low-slung house, warm and welcoming?  Maybe it’s a towering stone church, commanding respect with its watchful gaze.  Or it could be an abandoned apartment, desolate and forgotten.

 

            I created this project to examine these personalities, enhance them, and undo them.  Each building oozed particular emotions, trying to tell its own story.  An image layer was added to bring out that story; making a corner store appear warmer and more homespun, like a sepia-toned memory.  Then a second layer was added over the first to subvert the building’s emotion.  The corner store becomes cold, unfeeling; an abandoned apartment becomes warm instead.  These two layers play against each other on top of the original image to create a visual experience, a story in three parts: what is, what should be, and what never can be.

 

            Art is an incredibly, wonderfully subjective medium, and everybody draws their own meanings and conclusions.  To some, a picture of a building is just that, a picture of a building.  For others it can hold a narrative, a story told to an audience otherwise unavailable.  The artist doesn’t get to say whether a work matters, or even whether it succeeds.  All the artist can do is tell stories, enrich lives, and try to help the world see, and live, in stereo.