Asma Al-Masyabi "False Front"

Hello! This is Asma Al-Masyabi, the artist behind False Front.

A commercial false front is a style of building easily recognizable as a staple of the old west. A large rectangular front, often fancier than the rest of the building, faces the street, failing to hide the sloped roof behind it. There is something beautiful about the attempt, something very human to literally “put up a front.”

When early trespassers of Native homelands came to Colorado to settle, this is the first building they often put up after tents. Some of these buildings have simply burned or rotted away with time (since they were mostly made out of wood) and abandoned in mining towns. Many more have been destroyed to make room for more permanent and established buildings in so many towns in Colorado.

These invisible scaffolds created the state as we know it today, and it is a complicated, often violent history. This building stands at the balance of wanting to attract customers and be established despite the possible abandonment of whole mining towns and scarce resources. This building bears witness. It hides something, or attempts to.

It is a transgression. It reshapes its own story. It has largely disappeared. It lives on in our imagination and in the permanent cities and towns we live and work in today.

This cast iron sculpture began its life as some pieces of wood that I cut and shaped and then made temporary molds of. I used those molds to make a wax sculpture, which I then dipped in ceramic shell, which made a hard and thick shell around it. The wax was melted out of the shell, and then later hot iron was poured in at the University of Colorado Denver's iron pour. The ceramic shell did break and leak in the process, but due to the efforts of my professors, more than half of the sculpture was filled and did survive. This also became part of the story. After some refining and welding things back together, I put some water on the sculpture for that rusty effect.

Thank you for reading!