Foam lined the walls. Pennies spilled from the woodwork. Spotlights shone through holes cut in large pieces of plastic.
Within the dimly lit room, music played over videos of the artist evaluating his work.
Picket fences painted red were broken over large beams on dark metal. It was cold and sharp until you looked at the other side.
Soil and colorful pottery were displayed inside a picturesque frame. Mirrors reflected scenes across the room, despite the broken 15-foot plastic dome nested within the collection.
Dennis Maher's massive collection, which is made up of demolished buildings and remnants from around his West Side Buffalo neighborhood, is his attempt to demonstrate the connection between art, architecture and community.
Maher, an architecture professor at UB, is an architect and an artist and sees no difference in the two.
He was featured in The New York Times on Jan. 23 and is this year's artist in residence at the Albright-Knox Gallery. His show opened on Saturday.
He created House of Collective Repair to explore a "person's private space in an outermost public arena." He said this piece of art attempts to "intensify the relationship between those two facets of experience."
Maher asked local trade workers to create vignettes for him - featured in House of Collective Repair - by using demolished buildings and remnants from around his neighborhood.
It was the first time he's ever solicited other people for his artwork.
It was also the first time he's shifted his attention from demolition toward restoration. The departure highlights Maher's personal interests through what he sees as a synthesis of sculpture, architecture and renovation.
After the trade workers created the vignettes, Maher assembled the pieces into a unified structure - a way to reveal the buildings' histories. He was not envisioning something easily understood - neither was he intending it to be an object of beauty.
"[I] encourage discovery and glimpses into a world within and between which house and city reverberate against one another," Maher said.
Maher was compelled to develop his artwork not only as an exploration but also as a celebration. The community invests a great deal of effort into rehabilitation of buildings and while dilapidated buildings receive more attention, renovations are, perhaps, a worthier focus in Maher's eyes.
Maher said using other people's perspectives in his work is a "new beginning." By involving people in his project who work with homes, he became much more interested in the social dimensions of his practice. By involving the workers, he said he was able to create a more intimate connection between the home and the process of constructing a house.
The tension between city and home is a perspective that has endured for many years throughout Maher's work.
Maher is a man exuberant about his art, which was obvious as he explained the "overlay" between city and house his current artwork demonstrates.
That same energy, according to his former student John Costello, makes up the man behind the art.
Costello, a sophomore architecture major, described his former professor as "vibrant and articulate with a vivid personality." He said while it might be easier to think of Maher as crazy, he is actually very intuitive, and his work is resultant of a fine artistic process combined with his personality.
Costello went on to explain how Maher's work pushes people to look at things from multiple perspectives, and even if you have seen something hundreds of times, you will probably be experiencing something different the next time you visit his art.
Maher's work inspires Costello to "reimagine something."
Maher described his artwork in Albright-Knox as a blend between his former gallery pieces and the ongoing project at his home. House of Collective Repair marks an increase in complexity, combining large- and small-scale objects within the representations that work together to form "seeds of ideas" that he could use in his future artwork.
Despite the convoluted nature of Maher's collective, confusion is not in his vernacular.
Maher "doesn't even believe in chaos." Rather, he believes "there's nothing that doesn't have some type of pattern," according to Costello.
While Anne Hulse, whose son is taking a class at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, could only describe House of Collective Repair as chaotic, Costello asserts there is more method than madness to Maher's art.
Costello acknowledges it is difficult to perceive exactly what Maher's artwork is, but he admires how it gives an audience "the opportunity to see things from another angle - a different perspective."
This was precisely Maher's goal.
"I don't operate with very prescriptive methods, but I want to encourage visitors to make discoveries, to navigate and to focus on elements as one of a kind through the residues," Maher explained.
Remaining open to various resources for his art allowed Maher's "chaos" to become an avenue for exploration.
The exploration doesn't end in the art galleries; Maher brings his art home. His entire home - accented in low lighting - is filled with sculptures and decorated in a style similar to what he exhibits. The only room not featuring his home-themed unconventional sculptures is his kitchen.
Resonant of Costello's explanation of "reimaging," Maher said his art is an attempt to "reimagine the system, the standard, the languages that we work with when we think about what we inhabit."
House of Collective Repairis Maher's new way of celebrating a community's rehabilitation of dilapidated buildings - an act of art and architecture alike.
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