Critic and professor Matthew Strecher defines magic realism as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”

That is what Brian Goggins is graphically showing us with Defenestration, his, now 14 year old, art installation at 6th and Howard.

Brian explained to me that he is taking the rather contemporary concept of Land Art and applying it to an urban setting.

Instead of a wide open space in which the landscape and the work of art are inextricably linked, Brian Goggins wants you to look at this dilapidated old building, how it is inextricably linked to its environment and how it acts as a canvas for the absurd.

As absurd as fleeing furniture may seem, these pieces are a wonderful metaphor for showing us how we humans are in a precarious position with our environment, and in Brian’s case, he looks at that with optimism and quite obviously, humor.

I had the joy of watching the piece when it first went up, and have lived with it as it has aged, mimicking the building in its sad dilapidation. Despite a make over a few years ago, the ravages of time take over making this a perfect real-time, San Francisco view of Life After Humans.

Brian has two favorite times to view the piece. First as the light is hitting the wall of the 6th street façade in the early dawn. The second is in the Autumn as the sun sets on the Howard Street Façade.

In the middle of the night, you can truly enjoy its animated beauty as pigeons fly in and out of the refrigerator and you inevitably feel the link between the urban wild, architecture and art.

Brian said that the benefit of having a piece up in a space like this for such a long time gives you an opportunity to integrate a new understanding of it over time.

Something I have come to agree with completely as I have come to feel it is alive and maturing and says so much about the corner it lives on.