04/27/2026
Photographed on medium-format film throughout the United States, Sinziana Velicescu’s Purgatory, Paradise series depicts the American landscape as defined by seemingly abandoned architectural sprawl. Focusing on civic and commercial buildings, she is interested in public and private structures that provide a framework for everyday experiences: sites of work, commerce, gathering, and transit. Sinziana captures the clean facades, flat planes, and sun-bleached surfaces of these buildings devoid of people, reducing them to abstraction. Cloudless cerulean skies provide angular demarcations around interminable expanses of beige and grey, punctuated occasionally by vertical and horizontal slices of windows. Shadows stack and layer, adding their own architectural agenda superimposed onto the forms beneath them. In these photographs, ambitious structures and institutions once built to signal progress and permanence now appear suspended between promise and uncertainty. Sinziana captures these liminal spaces in our landscape and culture, the tension between what was promised and what was received.
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