Shark!
Titled “Shark!”, this diptych plays on pareidolia, transforming ordinary architectural details into the impression of a shark. Abstract forms take on representational roles, blending humor, threat, and perception in a visually compelling interpretation.
At first glance, the diptych titled “Shark!” reads as a study in architectural abstraction: two sharply composed images, one showing industrial stairs and a smooth white panel, the other a curving glass ceiling framed by a dark metal grid. But the title—abrupt, exclamatory, and loaded with narrative suggestion—invites viewers to see something else: a shark.
This act of visual re-coding is central to the work’s conceptual strength. The left panel, dominated by three metallic stair treads that protrude from shadow like gleaming blades, evokes a row of pointed teeth. A black circular object mounted on the adjacent wall appears as an unblinking eye. The smooth pale surface, bisected by a seam, reads like the underside of a jaw. These elements, when viewed together, become unmistakably animate—sharp, watching, poised.
In contrast, the right panel’s ceiling grid, gently warped and backlit with diffuse light, takes on the visual rhythm of scales or the rippling surface of a marine creature in motion. The curved, diagonal distortion of the pattern creates a sense of musculature, of depth and direction. What might otherwise be a static architectural ceiling becomes fluid, suggestive of a dorsal fin arcing through water or the textured skin of a massive fish just below the surface.
This transformation hinges on pareidolia—the psychological phenomenon in which the human mind perceives familiar forms in unrelated stimuli. The diptych challenges viewers to move past literalism and engage with the impulse to make meaning. By combining minimal architectural forms with a title that points toward the animal world, the image provokes a slippage between abstraction and figuration. What was once utilitarian becomes narrative; what was structural becomes symbolic.
The humor of “Shark!” is subtle but potent. There is a playfulness in rendering a predator out of institutional surfaces—stairs, panels, ceilings—typically associated with museums, airports, or offices. At the same time, the shark carries a weighty cultural symbolism: sleek, efficient, and dangerous. From film to finance, it is a creature often invoked to signal threat beneath the surface. In this context, the work flirts with the idea that modern spaces—particularly those defined by surveillance and control—harbor a quiet menace.
This is especially true of the black circle, interpreted here as an eye. Its central position and glossy surface lend it an eerie presence, a surveillance aesthetic that reinforces broader themes of watching and being watched. The adjacent stair-teeth amplify this sense of latent violence or constraint, while the flowing geometry of the right panel counterbalances with a more organic, even seductive, form.
By assigning animal characteristics to impersonal structures, the work invites reflection on the ways architecture disciplines movement, behavior, and perception. The shark becomes a metaphor for the spaces we inhabit daily—spaces that, while seemingly neutral, are shaped by power, control, and unseen forces.
Ultimately, “Shark!” is an exercise in imaginative seeing. It reminds us that even the most mundane visual inputs can carry metaphorical weight, and that the act of naming—of assigning identity through language—can transform how we experience the built environment. Through clever composition and conceptual framing, the diptych swims in the space between architecture and allegory, abstraction and narrative, humor and critique.
Essay written: May 2025