Startling art of the housing collapse

[Click the photo to go to a full slideshow.]

Conceptual artist Michael Jantzen admits that his work "gets a lot of attention." We aren't surprised.

At first glance, Jantzen's photos of radically skewed McMansion-style abodes look Seussian but plausible. Were the houses built that way? Did they fall victim to an earthquake?

But a closer look exposes the photos' computer-altered nature.

Jantzen tells us that they're pictures of homes in the St. Louis area, where he was born and raised. His digital alterations explore the foreclosure crisis and the collapse of things that we "take for granted as being stable." Here's how he describes the collage process: "Sections of the photos are simply rotated out of their normal positions relative to the whole image in order to create the illusion of fragmentation, and then reconstructed into a new hybrid image."

Surprising and unsettling though they are, the photos aren't too terribly unlike actual physical structures that Jantzen has really built.

His M-House, which Fast Company Design described as a "portable, foldable house made for art collectors," showed at the Museum of Modern Art a few years ago. The (yes, livable!) house nearly sold to Brad Pitt, except that the site apparently was a problem.

Instead, the M-House sold to a Korean art collector. And now, sadly -- but maybe a bit poetically, again echoing the state of the housing market -- it sits in hundreds of pieces in the humble L.A. suburb of Gardena awaiting reconstruction in a more permanent situation, Jantzen says.

Prints of his series "Deconstructing the Houses," pictured in our 12-image slideshow, are available by emailing Jantzen through his website.