'The Fire in The Eyes' (Nikita Nomerz)

No town is without its eyesores. Abandoned buildings litter most landscapes; in Detroit alone there are some 70,000 of them. Properties fall out of use and are left to a decidedly grim fate: brick soils, mortar crumbles, and veiny overgrowth peeks out of structural flaws. The resulting visual acts as a window into a time when bodies bustled about hallways and voices echoed off walls.

Rooms in the long since defunct Domino Sugar Refinery in Brooklyn remain coated in a viscous, sugary tar. The rusty Ferris wheel that breaks the horizon in Pripyat, Ukraine, creaks in the wind just as it did the day the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded 27 years ago. Rows of cots rest behind the towering facade of the Greystone Insane Asylum, awaiting new patients. No matter the structure, lingering remnants of the past trigger visceral fears that somehow these decrepit constructions have taken on a much different life, all their own.

But what if that feeling became reality? What if you awoke to the sight of that run-down building on your corner block glaring back at you? In Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, street artist Nikita Nomerz has turned that improbable scenario into a reality with his series of murals aptly titled, "The Living Wall."

Nomerz channels the decaying features of the structures in his industrial hometown to create buildings, personified. From empty silos, to degenerate houses, each of Nomerz's faces exude the same stoic expression that embodies abandonment.

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