Art in All: Seeing Beauty in the Forgotten

 

To many, abandoned spaces like the one pictured above would be considered an eyesore. To me, I see a beautiful space that acts as a time capsule for our cultural past. In the past year, I discovered urban exploring videos on YouTube. A lot of the time, these videos tried to amplify the spookiness of the places, but in most cases, they felt very calm and interesting to me. This sparked my imagination, and I became very curious about these kinds of spaces.

One day in the fall, while driving to a friend’s home in Bloomington, I discovered one of these abandoned buildings. I didn’t stop, but it stuck in my mind for a few weeks. Then I forgot about it until late winter. Somehow I was reminded of it again and gathered a group of people to go take pictures of it with me. As soon as I was there, I started to understand why people wanted to explore these spaces. They are full of texture and interesting images that have been lost in time. It felt like the perfect type of place to paint. It offered so much to the artist and gave me the opportunity to explore different ways of portraying these textures with paint. I am currently creating artwork that looks at abandoned spaces.

I find places like this to be quite beautiful. They are almost like monuments representing our nostalgia for the past few decades. They are pieces of art to draw from while creating my own work. There is something so satisfying about the peeling paint and overgrown areas of these buildings. They have a serene feeling to them. I think that the people who document these spaces in videos and photos understand this feeling. They understand how these spaces must be preserved and respected. That they should be looked at, not touched or changed, just like a piece of fine art.

While I won’t go around encouraging everyone to find these places, I think it is beneficial to look at the content people create about exploring abandoned spaces. Most of the time, the locations are kept secret to protect them from people who would harm them. They are also often found by chance. So I wouldn’t say everyone needs to go out there and explore, but it is good to learn about them. They have so much to offer to us about our collective past and can be quite awe-inspiring to see, like a master artwork.