Taryn Sheppard is a visual artist and trained architect whose practice investigates the psychological and perceptual conditions of space in the post-digital era. Drawing from her background in architecture, Sheppard constructs fictional 3D models and reinterprets them as oil paintings—reimagining architectural forms that exist only in simulation. Through this process, she explores how virtual structures might reach back toward human presence, perception, and meaning.

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This new body of work, titled "Five Senses Here I Come",  is situated within a critical lineage of architectural thought. In the 1980s, Juhani Pallasmaa called for an architecture that re-engages the senses—arguing against the flattening effects of vision-dominant design. Jean Baudrillard’s The System of Objects extends this critique, suggesting that modern design, especially when mediated by technology, detaches form from scale, material, and emotional resonance. Sheppard's work echoes these concerns, translating rigid digital geometries into compositions that are ambiguous, atmospheric, and subtly disorienting.
 

The grid appears throughout her paintings—not just as a compositional device, but as a conceptual structure. Referencing Superstudio’s use of the grid as both symbol and critique of modernist rationalism, Sheppard presents the grid as a relic of digital modeling environments, a scaffold that gestures toward control while also revealing a system at risk of abstraction and emptiness.

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Equally influential to her practice is Giorgio de Chirico, whose metaphysical cityscapes presented space as a vehicle for psychological tension, mystery, and poetic unease. Like de Chirico, Sheppard conceives of architecture as more than physical enclosure—it becomes a stage for interior states, memory, and existential ambiguity. In her work, 3D modeling itself becomes a kind of psychological landscape: ordered, artificial, but full of implication.
 

The resulting paintings occupy a space between diagram and dream. Massings float, cast shadows, and remain uninhabited. These are not functional buildings, but images of architecture unmoored from utility—quietly expressive of distance, projection, and the emotional atmospheres we construct around built form.