About

Dennis Maher is an artist practicing in sculpture, installation, architecture, and design. He creates fantastic environments from found, augmented, and newly built architectural fragments, furnishings, miniatures, and other objects. His dream-like spaces stir the architectural imagination, recalling buildings under simultaneous demolition and construction, lost cities, curiosity cabinets, and other marvelous worlds. Maher draws upon patterns of ruination and reconstruction in the built environment, often unbuilding and rebuilding his works over many years. The saturated layering of materials and scales in his work creates a deep sense of time.

Maher’s own residence in Buffalo, NY, The Fargo House, is an evolving 15-year experiment wherein the continuous assembly and excavation of collected fragments collides with patterns of living. Many of his recent projects have been with Assembly House 150 (AH150) in Buffalo, an organization that he founded and directs, and that builds wondrous environments while providing educational opportunities in the construction arts. With AH150, he is transforming a formerly abandoned 1850s-era church into an immersive architectural dreamworld. The former church, renamed Assembly House, contains an ever-evolving 3D collage of building fragments, sculptural environments, models, and other artifacts—built with tradespeople, designers, apprentices, students, and others. Themes of Maher’s work include the natures of house and home, the boundaries of art and architecture, the animism of objects, the revelation of the surreal within the familiar, and the latent memories of Western and post-industrial cultures.

Maher was born in Baltimore, MD. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University in 1999.  He moved to Buffalo, NY in 2002 where he worked in the construction and demolition industries for 8 years. His experiences working on sites of construction and demolition shaped his regard for buildings as fluid assemblages of material. Maher’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (Buffalo, NY), the Mattress Factory Art Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), the Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (Shenzhen, CN), Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), and Black and White Gallery and Project Space (NYC).  Maher has taught in the Department of Architecture at University at Buffalo since 2023.