In Demolition's Wake, the Remains of a Future City

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- For the past five years, artist and architect Dennis Maher has collected discarded building materials from demolition sites and salvage yards throughout the de-industrialized city of Buffalo.

He has used them to create haunting sculptures, paintings and environmental installations that he usually installs in other city buildings slated for demolition, restoration or renovation.

Maher is an adjunct instructor in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning, so his use of buildings (and their torn and damaged parts) stems from a longstanding fascination with the origin and nature of urban structures, and the materials lend themselves to Maher's metaphoric intent.

His art speaks to the way in which these construction materials and the buildings that comprised them once were used. It questions how he and others are "re-using" both. It also asks what this transformation means to the future of an urban space whose old parts stand before us like tangled, complicated ghosts of our industrial lives.

From Nov. 11-14, "Eternal Returns," Maher's "reorganized remains of post-industrial urban transformation" will be exhibited Cornell University's John Hartell Gallery in Ithaca, N.Y. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

"On one level, my works offer an approach to re-invigorating vacant buildings through the re-using of urban waste," he says, "but on another, perhaps more abstract level, I want the resulting constructions to suggest, in their layered and textured surfaces, the contours of cities and landscapes that have yet to emerge.

Maher notes that in our post-industrial urban environment we live in the midst of waste and emptiness marked by buildings, often huge and industrial, now considered ruined or useless.

He points out that the demolition, renovation and restoration of these buildings produces a great deal of vacant space and an enormous amount of urban waste

"We see it," he says, "in the spaces vacated by their demolition, inside the 'leftover' buildings themselves when stripped of their former function and the materials that defined them, and in the enormous piles of plaster, wood and metal that constituted their structures."

Maher calls his structures "afterlives," and says they are his attempt "to renew and to give another life to the wasted remains of a city."

In searching for materials and producing his work, Maher says he explores the latent potential of waste and emptiness while at the same time cultivating new relationships between demolition contractors, property owners, developers, and the material waste of buildings itself.

For more information on his work, contact Dennis Maher at (716) 906-1434 or dmmaher@buffalo.edu.

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York. UB's more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.