If you’ve ever wondered about what lay behind closed doors, BUILDING, now on view at Project 4 Gallery, gives you a glimpse of just how big that universe can be beyond the boarded windows and padlocked gates.

A small, unassuming brick building in Belfast, Northern Ireland ran the city’s electricity for nearly half a century. Once wild with rippling currents and responsible for channeling energy to all of residential, domestic, commercial, and industrial Belfast, the vacant building later became the thesis and whole impetus for this BUILDING project. Untouched since the early 1980s, the electrical switch room is pretty standard as far as abandoned buildings go. But this one seems to have a secret "energy" of its own, even years after its desertion. Empty, it is a ghost town of archaic electrical wonders.

Before its renovation in 2005, OAR, a collective comprised of a mix of five Irish and American artists, swooped in to document and recover its remains. BUILDING, the dreamy story of this battery of Belfast leaves an eerie vestige in its wake.

Six large-format photographs by Christopher Heaney reveal the space’s undisturbed, bizarre archeological record. The stark interiors show barren office space, a neglected rotary phone, coat hooks where workers used to hang their hats. Upstairs is Heaney’s Untitled #1 (pictured), taken in the central transformer room – the nervous system of the city. You can almost hear the buzzing of electrical current and feel the high-voltage danger just looking at it.

Mac Premo’s stop animation video, strategically located at the front of the gallery, provides a demographic overview of Belfast during the time of the switch room's operation, chronicling the city using graphs and charts made up of found objects collected from the site as visuals.

Oliver Jeffers’ found objects add a physical mysticism to the show. Actual electronics, with an outdated 80s charm, grace the walls and the floors. An all too familiar first-aid kit hangs there just like it must have in Belfast, looking so undisturbed that you get the sense that there are still 25-year-old Band-Aids inside it.

The most cumbersome piece in BUILDING is Connection by Rory Jeffers (yes, he’s Oliver’s brother). Made of almost 13 feet of rag board, it depicts a line of circuitry connecting a series of fuses and feeders. It leaves you with a spooky quote from a former employee – "nothing happened in Belfast that we didn’t know about" – that strangely personifies the switch room and suggests that the people who worked there were as important as the Pope.

Duke Riley’s contribution to BUILDING condenses the exhibition’s sense of abandonment, the depressive beauty of the interior, and the people of Belfast most concisely in Building, his lo-fi video with audio recording. It plays an answering machine cassette tape that captured angry Irish reports of a blackout way back when. These excuse-me-mister-my-power-went-out messages were left long ago by many a paying customer who hadn’t gotten word of the company’s new digs.

Viewing BUILDING, an altogether successful collaboration of artists from Brooklyn and from across the pond, reminds us of how manual technology once was, how reliant we are on it, and, dare it be said, just how lucky we are to have Pepco.

Photo courtesy of Project 4 Gallery.