Portrait of Dennis Maher by Bruce Adams
Dennis Maher is an artist working across sculpture, installation, architecture, and design. He creates fantastic environments from found and newly built architectural fragments, furnishings, miniatures, and other objects. His architectural dreamworlds are immersive spaces of material, memory, and imagination—existing between construction and demolition, archaeology and invention, ruin and renewal.
Maher’s practice is grounded in the continuous unbuilding and rebuilding of the built environment. Working through layers of objects, materials, scales, and histories, he creates spaces that intensify our experience of time, as if they have been excavated from an unknown past or are becoming something else. His work asks us to reconsider the nature of house and home, the boundary between art and architecture, and the memories and possibilities carried by the things around us.
In Buffalo, NY, Maher’s own residence, The Fargo House, operates as an evolving experiment in art, architecture, and living—part curiosity cabinet and part archaeological dig. His long-term project, The Assembly House, transforms a former church into a “dreamworld for the building arts”: an ever-changing 3D collage of building fragments, sculptural environments, models, and other artifacts constructed in collaboration with tradespeople, apprentices, students, and others.
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 the University at Buffalo since 2004.