Assembled City Fragments

Buffalo, NY. 2009 - present

The Fargo House is an immersive experiment in art, architecture, and living. Inside the house, the continuous assembly, dismantlement, and reassembly of collected city fragments collides with the basic functions of dwelling and with excavations into the nature of home.

In 2009, Dennis Maher acquired an 1890’s era house on Fargo Avenue that was slated for demolition. Since then, he has been living in the house and simultaneously transforming it. Maher continuously collects salvaged materials and artifacts — including antique toys, architectural salvage, miniatures, unique furnishings and other evocative objects—and assembles these within the house while also excavating through the walls, floors, and ceilings. Inside the house, an ever-evolving universe of miniature cities, imaginary maps, ruinous landscapes, and fictitious buildings collides with basic functions like cooking, dining, bathing, reading, sleeping, and storage. The house has hosted drawing workshops for artists and students, curated community dinners, projects with students of architecture, exhibitions by local and national artists and tours for city residents and visitors.

Visit The Fargo House website

Burchfield Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY. 2023

Interfield transforms two former classrooms at the Burchfield Penney Art Center into a densely layered, inspiring environment where visitors are invited to make and explore art. Using specially crafted furnishings, sculptural walls, and found and altered artifacts, Interfield combines the functions of a museum education space with dream-like visions of an interior living room and garden grotto.

Conceived as an interactive field of evocative objects, the work is an invitation for discovery; it encourages interaction with the layered assemblages of forms, textures, and surfaces. Interfield consists of two complementary spaces—one that re-imagines familiar interior furnishings—and another that evokes the mystery of a garden amid ruins. A unique glass-topped table connects the two spaces, winding throughout while providing a visually intriguing surface upon which to draw, paint, sculpt, and model.

This collaboration between Dennis Maher and Assembly House 150 connects art, design, and construction with skill-building in the construction trades. The work was constructed by the team of builders, designers, students, and apprentices at Assembly House 150. While working on components for Interfield, students and apprentices participated in workshops gaining skills in fine cabinetmaking, furniture refinishing, historic painting, and stained glass.

Buffalo, NY. 2015 - present

Assembly House is an immersive artwork by Dennis Maher and Assembly House 150 (AH150) that transforms a historic former church into a continuously evolving architectural dreamworld. The work consists of an ever-changing collage of sculptural environments, restored and newly-built architectural fragments, models, and other artifacts, interwoven with layers of the surrounding building. The reimagined church offers a foil to the increasing banality of the built world and gives expression to the act of building and to the city as forms of collective art.

The installations within Assembly House are conceived as miniature buildings and parts of buildings that provide distinct spaces for both individual and shared experiences. Workshop and tool areas; collection displays; spaces for exhibition, gathering, and study; and books, models, and drawings overlay with defining features of the church—including gothic arches, ornamental wood, plaster, and stained glass.

Constructed in collaboration with tradespeople, designers, artists, students, and others, the assembled components are social as well as material. Participants in AH150 programs work on the adaptation of the building and on other creative projects, acquiring and sharing skills in construction arts. Many individuals who gain skills at Assembly House go on to apply their knowledge in their careers and in their own living spaces and neighborhoods.

Visit Assembly House 150 website

Mattress Factory Art Museum, 2023.

The Dollhouse for Barbara is an homage to Mattress Factory founder Barbara Luderowski. It was installed in Dennis Maher’s Second Home project as a last rite for the 7-year long exhibition. The following letter was written to accompany the piece:

Dear Barbara—

Looking through the layers of time, I have imagined a giant dollhouse for you, a swan song for A Second Home. I wanted this piece to echo through your own collections of dollhouses, toys, and miniatures, and to house your hand tools that were bestowed to me, and that you used to make art and to repair antique dollhouses. It is a dollhouse for tinkering beyond the threshold.

I also wanted it to be built with other people.

Architecture students at CMU have fashioned many of its parts: dream-like stairs, rooftops, mantles, and other core house elements. The students worked with their woodshop technician to acquire new skills, and we all talked together about imaginary houses and making materials do things that they might not want to do. The students shared their own stories of rebellious walls, fantastic environments that they aspired to and of which they feared, and those stories now have a place to dwell together.

It has been seven years since you and Michael visited my house and church in Buffalo and invited me to Pittsburgh to turn an old brick rowhouse into something we could give to the city for a period of time—a sieve for the memories of days long past, and a spark for places not yet seen.

Since the doors of A Second Home opened, I’ve heard many recollections from people who’ve visited. These recollections have struck¬¬¬ me because they’ve spoken of special connections to buildings and objects, places and things strongly remembered, or forgotten about. I’ve heard childhood memories, tales of house keys, and attics where things go lost and are found again. These tales are with you, spirits among us.

My art has evolved over the last seven years to become as much about assembling people as it is about assembling things. The dollhouse was also built with people who’ve touched Assembly House in Buffalo, where we work each day to create wondrous environments, and where people can learn how to build.

I will be moving all of my things out of the rowhouse soon so that new art can take place there. I am leaving behind the dollhouse for you and for Pittsburgh. The old house has a lot of dust, and I will look forward to things getting uncovered and to pieces moving into their next forms.

I am grateful for the memories, especially for the ones that haven’t been mine.

With much love—for you, houses, art, the city of Pittsburgh, and people who build.

Dennis

Mattress Factory Art Museum. Pittsburgh, PA. 2017 - 2023.

A Second Home transforms the ten room, three-story row house at 516 Sampsonia Way into a mysterious dreamland where the subconscious of a house can dwell. The installation uses construction materials, furnishings, toys, architectural salvage, models, evocative objects, video projections and audio elements to produce an immersive meditation on the visible and invisible patterns of a house. Within the nooks, corners, and passages of A Second Home, ideas of library, study, parlor, wardrobe, tinkerer’s workshop, attic, sewing room, and play space drift with those of ruin, construction site, and miniature imaginary city.

A Second Home includes unique contributions from Pittsburgh artists, artisans and tradespeople, including Miriam Devlin, Kate Joyce, Michael Koliner and Racheljoy Rodas, special projects by Daniel Salomon and Cameron Neuhoff, furniture elements by the Society for the Advancement of Construction Related Arts (SACRA), and a soundscape composed by Dubravka Bencic and Kevin Bednar. The project also utilizes extraordinary objects culled from the private collections of the Mattress Factory's founders and original inhabitants, Barbara Luderowski and Michael Olijnyk. Construction assistant: Scott Bye

Assembly House. Buffalo, NY. 2018

The Cabinet Drawer Room hearkens back to the historical tradition of cabinet rooms—intimate, dreamy spaces that organized symbols of knowledge into rooms for study, contemplation and display. This version of such a room reinterprets and combines elements of the Victorian-era house. It includes variations on features particular to the Victorian-era, such as built-in cabinets, a bay window (turned bookcase), inlay floor, stained glass, decorative molding elements, wood siding and classic furnishings.

The Cabinet Drawer Room was constructed by participants in the SACRA construction skills training program at Assembly House 150. Construction team lead: Quincy Koczka. Assistants: Will Blanda, Nick Wheeler, Jaden Ramirez-Zeno.

2012 - 2013.

Eight tradespeople representing distinct professions— plumbing, painting, masonry, windows/doors, roofing, electrical, flooring, and weatherization—were invited to The Fargo House to discuss their work in the construction and renovation industries and exchange ideas about houses and city building. Each tradesperson was commissioned to build a "house model" utilizing only the materials of his/her respective trade. The house models then became the genesis of a superstructure entitled The House of Collective Repair.

House of the Plumber, by Jamillah Green

House of the Painter, by Joseph Galvin

House of the Mason, by Dave Hill

House of the Window and Door Restorer, by Daniel Farrell

House of the Roofer, by Chris Ziolkowski

(Tower) House of the Electrician, by Peter Szalay

(Patio) House of the Floor Refinisher, by Joaquin Arristozabal

236 Normal Avenue. Buffalo, NY. 2019

The New Normal Porch is a project for PUSH Buffalo, a CDC that provides affordable housing on Buffalo’s West Side. The new wrap-around porch for this two-family house presents a dynamic and playful face to the street while providing four unique room-like environments which might be shared or divided by the occupants. These outdoor rooms allow for different forms of weather protection, shade, privacy and distinction through the use of screens, partial enclosures and other decorative elements that allude to the neighboring historic, Victorian-era houses.

The New Normal Porch was constructed by participants in the SACRA construction skills training program at Assembly House 150. Construction team lead: Quincy Koczka, Will Blanda, Nick Wheeler. Assistants: Caz Garrison, Jaidon Ramirez-Zeno.

Northland Workforce Training Center. Buffalo, NY. 2018

Northland Pattern Wall: City of Past and Future Craft is a three-dimensional wooden wall mural, constructed for the public lobby of the Northland Workforce Training Center. The design incorporates components built by students in the SACRA program at Assembly House 150—including wood inlays, molding profiles and frames, demonstrations of joinery techniques, architectural models and other crafted details—and blends them with wooden pattern relics found within the former Niagara Machine and Tool Works, the site of the wall’s installation. Together, the SACRA designed artifacts and historic wooden patterns construct an imaginary cityscape—one that celebrates and re-imagines Buffalo's legacy of craftsmanship while projecting toward its future through a new generation of builders and dreamers.

Burchfield-Penney Art Center, Buffalo, NY. 2010

Aggregate Lost intensifies the temporal and material changes that occur when space is created and destroyed. It crystallizes a moment of tension between forces that bind together and those that push and pull apart. Laborers were hired to construct an 8ft cube in the gallery using standard lumber and drywall. At the end of an 8 hr work day, the labor was halted. The partially completed cube was hoisted to the ceiling, just above head height. It was then clad with four independently suspended panels of aggregated detritus from sites of house demolitions. Each panel acted as both a frame and a mask, intensifying the emptiness at the cube's core.

Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Buffalo, NY. Artist-in-Residence Exhibition. 2013

The House of Collective Repair builds connections between art and people who work on houses for a living. For the duration of this residency project, Maher’s Fargo House became a creative forum for tradespeople in the home renovation industry. Eight tradespeople representing distinct professions—plumbing, painting, electrical, masonry, windows/doors, roofing, flooring, and weatherizatio—were invited to The Fargo House to discuss their work in the construction industries and their approaches to renovation, preservation and development and the city. Each tradesperson was then commissioned to build a ‘house model’ utilizing only the materials of his/her respective trade. The house models became the genesis of a collective superstructure—The House of Collective Repair— within which the models were also nested.

Assembly House, Buffalo, NY. 2018 - present

The A.E. Minks Archive is a mnemonic display, storytelling device and repository for the drawings of architect August Minks and his son, Richard, who immigrated to Buffalo from Hungary in 1896. Between 1896 and the death of August in 1910, A.E. Minks and Son designed approximately 40 buildings for the city, including the oldest Jewish synagogue (Ahavas Sholem), the French Church (Our Lady of Lourdes), the Hungarian Reform Church, and many residential and commercial buildings. The A.E. Minks Archive project was initiated upon the discovery of original A.E. Minks and Son drawings at a Buffalo estate sale in 2017. The project utilizes these drawings, as well as historical research, oral histories, models and photographs, in order to explore the continuous creation and fragmentation of identities and places, overlaid with the development of the city of Buffalo over time.

The A.E. Minks Archive is an ongoing research project with students at University at Buffalo, School of Architecture and Planning.

Starlight Studio and Art Gallery. Buffalo, NY. 2009

Starlight City is a prototype display and storage device realized in collaboration with artists at Starlight Studio and Art Gallery, the art program of the Learning Disabilities Association of Western New York. Through workshops facilitated by Dennis Maher, Starlight Studio artists created sculptural models of imaginary architectural structures. These models became the basis for the design and construction of the prototype. Pieces of the models were constructed at full-scale and collaged. The resulting assemblage suggested ways of housing other artwork made by the artists, including jewelry, prints, ceramics and postcards.

The construction of Starlight Studio was assisted by graduates in the SACRA Program at Assembly House 150. Construction team lead: Quincy Koczka and Caz Garrison

Sibley Dome. Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. 2013

This installation within the Sibley Dome was conceived as a satellite of The Fargo House. It was constructed from found objects, including ordinary building materials, furniture, and domestic artifacts, many of which were culled from Maher’s own living space. The overarching canopy of Sibley Dome and other canopy-like objects—such as tents, umbrellas, and a trampoline—provided a surrogate environment for the Fargo House’s displaced ‘furnishings.’ When the satellite exhausted the duration of its mission at Sibley, it returned to The Fargo House where pieces of the satellite were used to realize new domestic alterations.

Project Assistants: Micaela Barker, Braedy Chapman, John Costello, Andrew delle Bovi, Juan Andres de Risio, Michael Gainer, Kathryn Hobert, Kyle Mcmindes, Matthew Rosen, Elizabeth Saleh, Daniel Salomon

Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism Shenzhen, China. 2015.

The Hole in the Window (of the World) House is a portal to distant yet familiar sites of architectural fantasy. The project draws inspiration from the Window of the World replica park in Shenzhen, a site that contains replicas of 130 of the world’s most famous monuments, including the Eiffel tower, the Pyramids and the Palace at Versailles, all reproduced in miniature within a park-like setting. For this installation, half-finished furniture pieces were acquired from carpenter’s shops in the villages surrounding Shenzhen and were combined with models, toys, statues, and other souvenirs gathered from the city, as well as construction debris and scaffolding from the project site. The installation is an invitation to pass through multi-scalar assemblages of shifting reveries.

Project Assistants: Yumeng Chen, Meiyan Jin, Hongkai Li, Lesley Loo, Feng Zhu

Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT. 2012.

Black and White Gallery/Project Space. Brooklyn, NY. 2010.

The Nightworks were realized over course of 16 days while Maher was employed as a demolition laborer at the site of the vacant Farrar Mansion in Buffalo, NY. His primary task on the crew was to clear 1500 sq ft of interior space on the third floor of the building. During each day, according to the supervisor's instructions, various wall, floor, and ceiling components were removed. Each night, he returned to the site, collected those materials that were removed during the day, and assembled them in new arrangements. The resulting installations were photographed and then dismantled. All materials were returned to their prior locations before the next work day began.

read Nightworks essay