John MacConnell’s work explores identity, memory, and the stories we tell—or leave untold—about ourselves. In earlier exhibitions, he drew from the fragmented figures of antiquity to reflect on how we curate and construct our own images in the digital age. With If These Walls Could Talk, MacConnell shifts his focus from people to places—from portraiture of the body to portraiture of the home.

This series features paintings of houses in Fire Island Pines, a site layered with personal, cultural, and queer history. Though the figures are absent, the homes remain—silent witnesses to decades of joy, secrecy, freedom, and transformation. Each structure carries the echoes of lives lived within and around it. For MacConnell, these are more than buildings; they are keepers of collective memory, shaped by love, loss, resistance, and celebration.

While not portraits in the traditional sense, these works are approached with the same sensitivity he brings to painting people: a desire to capture presence, vulnerability, and narrative. The lines are loose, the forms expressive—yet within that interpretation lies a deeper truth. These homes have character. They’ve aged, shifted, adapted. They possess identities of their own. And like the friends and figures he’s painted before, they are rendered to be seen and remembered.

This exhibition continues MacConnell’s enduring interest in preservation—of memory, of queer space, of fleeting histories. Through these paintings, he honors the stories embedded in architecture and invites viewers to consider how the spaces around us reflect who we are and who we’ve been.