Sean Canty of Studio Sean Canty: Homemaking: Tall House

These images show a house as the beginning of becoming a home. This house’s occupants are moving in. Boxes are being unpacked. Art is being hung. These careful acts of placing and arranging the space are a profoundly personal dialogue between the occupants of this space and the architecture.

This moment is captured in a kind of cinemagraph: a still photograph in which minor and repeated movements occur. As the first acts of homemaking are taking place, the interstitial space between the spectrums of domestic life embedded in house and home call our attention. The cinemagraph suspends the time around this moment of uncomfortable occupation where one makes do until things are just right. 

This cinemagraph highlights a unique characteristic of this house: a three story circular void which offers visual, sonic, and atmospheric communication between each level of the house. Through this space, typical domestic ideas about privacy are complicated by this central collective experience shaping the movement of light, air, and sound. The house amplifies its interiority while making visible and audible the parts of the world that remain just outside. 

Project credits

Project team Sarah Dunham, Jack Wathieu, Jan Kwan, Rachel Skof, Adrian Corbey
Technical collaborators AKTII
Cinemagraph and imagery OKDRAW & Studio Sean Canty