Inside the Studio

Sinziana Velicescu in 'Elevations'

Sinziana Velicescu examining a large print set on a table in her studio with more prints pinned to the wall behind her.

Photographed on medium-format film throughout the United States, Sinziana’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. Explore more here.

Sinziana Velicescu taking a photo and wearing a grey jumpsuit in front of a weathered beige wall cast in yellow sunlight.

A Sinziana Velicescu photograph of a beige building cast with dramatic shadows against a cerulean sky.

A portrait of Sinziana Velicescu through the amber cast of a roll of developed film being held to the light.

Sinziana Velicescu photographing a pink and white building.

The United States has historically built its environment in pursuit of a national ideal. Structures in desert cities, suburban edges, and mid-century downtowns were designed to signify arrival, turning provisional spaces into purposeful and seemingly permanent places. Now, these buildings exist in suspension, neither inhabited nor abandoned, occupying the liminal spaces of American development: constructed with conviction, yet often experienced only in transit.
Sinziana Velicescu

Sinziana Velicescu examining a large print on a table in her studio.

A close-up of Sinziana Velicescu hand signing a print.

Sinziana Velicescu taking a photograph standing against grey double doors set inside a white facade.

A photograph by Sinziana Velicescu of a pink building with strong shadows and directional light casting a superimposed geometric pattern onto the building's facade.

When flattened by light and distance, distinctions blur. Clean facades, rational geometry, and sun-bleached surfaces reduce these structures to a shared visual language. The buildings remain intact and composed, yet hover between promise and uncertainty.
Sinziana Velicescu