DURHAM -- Dave Alsobrooks sees people who aren't there.
More specifically, the 35-year-old artist sees people living everyday lives - changing a light bulb, boiling water for tea - in vacant, boarded-up houses in the historic East Durham neighborhood near downtown.
In a few months, you'll be able to see them too, when Alsobrooks hangs life-size portraits in the window frames of four empty houses and the old Y.E. Smith Elementary School. Alsobrooks wants to encourage more people to move into the neighborhood of mill cottages fallen on hard times.
"If you're going to be able to buy a house you have to be able to visualize yourself or somebody else living in that space," he said. When all you see is a block of boarded-up buildings, "it's hard to get over that."
Part aesthetic, part political, the "New Neighbors" project is what Alsobrooks calls "social art."
A few years ago, he explains, he used to make "abstract paintings that didn't mean anything to anybody." You couldn't look at his work and see anything beyond globs of paint.
He still likes globs of paint. But recently as he sat in his Golden Belt studio applying lipstick-red globs to a portrait, he said he came to realize he had more to communicate with his art.
"New Neighbors" draws inspiration from an art project he saw in Toronto in which people were painted three stories tall on the sides of buildings and a Detroit project called "Object Orange." In the latter, artists staged pre-dawn operations painting abandoned buildings bright orange to call attention to that city's more than 7,000 abandoned structures.
"In either case it was a provocative act," Alsobrooks said.
Aiming for revitalization
His new project mirrors the work that preservation groups are doing to help revitalize East Durham. The neighborhood has begun to rebound with the opening of Joe's Diner and the TROSA Grocery on Angier Avenue. But many boarded-up mill houses remain.
Preservation North Carolina has acquired several of the vacant properties in hopes of attracting private investors and future residents. Piedmont regional director Cathleen Turner says the group was even thinking about hiring an artist to spruce up the boarded-up properties, "and along comes Dave."
"The nature of his work is so in sync with what we're trying to do," Turner said. "It's vibrant. It's lively. It brings so much life to the buildings that had so much life in them and will again."
Sara Davis Lachenman, whose Four Over One Design specializes in old buildings, said Alsobrooks is preserving history as much as actual houses.
"What he does now is really about telling a story and getting people to think about more than just what's on canvas," she said, "which I really love."
For "New Neighbors," Alsobrooks, who lived in southwest Durham before moving to Boone and now Efland in Orange County, photographed visitors to Golden Belt with simple household props.
He projects each image onto paper and loosely outlines them in a graphic novel style. He layers the paper with patterned tissue paper and applies paint in bright red, yellow, orange, lime green and cyan, which is like turquoise.
He's photographed each house and the 1910 neo-classical Smith elementary school and measured each space he plans to fill. Sheets of paper in his studio show copy machine pictures of each building. They look like pop-up books, with matchbook-size sketches covering windows now hammered over in ply board.
The finished portraits will hang exposed to the elements, sometimes protected by overhands and sometimes not.
"If the sun hits it and a certain portion gets faded, it adds to the story," he said. "It helps complete the history of the painting. It's almost like a journal of its time there."
At some point, the paintings will come down and Alsobrooks will try to sell them.
He's not sure who or if anyone will buy his social art, or even if they'll get the meaning behind it. He's not worried about it.
"I think it's up to each individual person how much they do or don't experience," he said. "We can all dig deeper into life."
