I’ve been thinking a lot about houses lately, as my final term as a university student comes to a close and I enter a world of credit, student debt, and the ever present pressure to build more credit without going into debt. Â I may never buy a house. Â I may rent or lease my entire life, or I may end up buying an apartment.
To be honest, right now the last thing I want to do is think about all of the financial ramifications of one of those red brick and white picket fence monstrosities.
Aesthetically however, several groups of artists seem to be taking the notion of a house and turning it into art lately.
French photographer Laurent Chehere is one of them, who is taking houses to new heights with his surrealist still life photography. Â After taking photos of real houses, he composites them into cloud and sky backgrounds with whimsical effects.
The last one reminds me of the 1956 French Film ‘The Red Balloon’, which the artist cites as inspiration. Â Chehere said that he wanted to transform some dilapidated houses into something ethereal, I would say that he succeeded. Â And all of Chehere’s works remind of the quintessential flying house movie ‘Up’. Â I smiled at seeing Chehere’s work because in in paradoxical way, I think he is grounding the genre of surrealist art, by inserting images of common houses in whimsical settings. Â There doesn’t seem to be an overt political message in his works, it is merely fantastical.
It’s a fantasy that I wouldn’t mind living in after college.
