Seth Clark

I was pretty excited to find Seth Clark’s work. He’s a mixed-media / collage artist from Pittsburgh who has been working on a series about collapsing and abandoned buildings for some years.

I really like abandoned buildings. There’s something about a space that was once somebody’s home or workplace that not only stands empty but is falling apart that makes you think of the transience of things. All that life a used building is infused with, just gone as the materials slowly deteriorate.

All the energy and care devoted to that space vanishes quickly with the incursions of nature. It all happens surprisingly quickly – a couple of broken windows, some winter snow gets in, and the next thing you know, the whole place is falling down. Clark captures that fragility.

Subject matter aside, from a craft perspective I really like Clark’s approach. he gets a real variety of marks and lines with all the different media he uses in his work and somehow I find that it lends a kind of verité to the mixed quality of architecture. In a sense it’s like 2-D models more than drawing, though Clark’s drawing skills are quite strong – his renderings look almost photographic until you look more closely. 

More of Clark’s work can be seen on his website or on his Facebook page.