Last Chance: Assembled City Fragments

Through the raw and rough contours of detritus and abandonment, the outlines of an Undone Redone City begin to emerge. --Dennis Maher, UB architecture professor and creator of Assembled City Fragments

Tonight will be your last chance to see an exhibit that is the result of six years of work by Dennis Maher, entitled Assembled City Fragments.   Others might call it art or sculpture, but Maher, whose materials come from demolitions, salvage sites, refuse bins, second-hand stores and presumably found art that he may have literally tripped over--simply referred to them as "models".

These "reorganized" pieces take on forms that Maher says are literal, suggesting a building or some other form, but for him "there is an ethereal linking too, between groups or individuals."  It makes perfect sense when one realizes that a lot of Maher's medium comes from his work through Buffalo ReUse.  A lot of it used to stand in the form of houses, which is why Maher refers to what he does as "regenerating places."

Maher says,  "People can call it whatever they want to.  The label is less important than the act of putting it together."  

"There is a way of being redone," Maher says.  "They get taken apart and remade.  Nothing is really static.  Materials and places change, always.  They evolve with our attitude toward space and place."

Maher explains this further using the example of walls within a house.  Remember that he's there for much of the demolition process, looking at it from several different ways.  "There's the house coming down, there are the layers of paint one sees on a single surface, painted 80, and then 50, and then 30 years ago."  As he says, there are the memories he sees.  And then the reassembly.  Maher imagines it as he sees the pieces coming down.  The once measured and precisely cut surfaces now fractured, ready to become something else.

He particularly likes uncovering boarded windows; it has a sense of passage in it for him.  "The idea of an opening that's been closed," Maher says, "It brings us to that attitude where we say, 'I find myself here.'"

One of the exhibits tonight will be that of an old parking lot attendant booth and 7 porch columns.  Maher likes to think of the urban icon as being so much in concert with primitive dwellings or huts.  "Think about it," he says, "it's a small structure that one person resides in for extended periods of time."

Most importantly, Maher feels that his Assembled City Fragments have a history, a role, and one that relates to the original.  "The hut started to have the figure of a face, and I thought again about that solitary figure in the parking lot.  I'd say this recaptures the original spirit."

Tonight, Friday, March 20, from 7-10PM at 506 Delaware Avenue