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Unsettling Houses

July 2013

  • Suzanne Fraser

Ian Strange’s Suburban at the NGV

Across three rooms at the NGV Studio in Federation Square, Brooklyn-based Australian artist Ian Strange presents to his Melbourne-situated audience a report on the state of the suburban home in America. This exhibition is not, however, a utilitarian record of human habitats; it is an imaginative, almost hallucinatory portrayal what the artist sees as existing behind the ordered veneer of that shipshape social structure, the suburban home. Documenting seven houses across six states – and covering a chronological distance of two years – this exhibition surveys the complex symbolism housed within the calm streets of “classic suburbia”.

The key element in this narrative is found in the artist’s treatment of the houses he encounters. After repainting and in two instances burning the houses, he then theatrically lights the properties before setting up his cameras and waiting until dawn or dusk to create the actual works of art. The artist explains this process in our interview: “the point of the work is the documentation”. All traces of human presence are also removed prior to filming, an act which serves to produce a record of unsettled houses across America. In fact the represented buildings were first made available to the artist and his team on account of their having been already unsettled in preparation for either demolition or reassignment. In this aspect the viewer might identify the looming presence of the GFC in suburbia, and the gradual depreciation of the American Dream. Don Draper does not live here.

Comprising nine cinematic stills, a video work shown across three screens, and several fragments taken from the houses featured in the exhibition, Suburban documents the product of the artist’s aesthetic interventions in suburbia. In one of the first projects of this series entitled Tenth Street, the artist presents a house that has been over-painted with a gargantuan skull and subsequently (we assume) set alight. In the moment captured in the image, orange flames emerge from a window and snake up towards the skull, while dusky smoke puffs gently from the front porch. As we imagine it, this moment is just the beginning of the fire’s destruction. Indeed Tenth Street is a nascent moment in the two-year series shown in the current exhibition, representing the beginning stages of what the artist has termed “a journey exhibition”.  

This journey initially began in 2011 with an installation on Sydney’s Cockatoo Island, at which point Strange’s exploration of the intersection of home and identity first took shape. This shape turned out to be a precise reconstruction of the artist’s childhood home, which Strange designed from memory and then enveloped in iconography of destruction: a painted skull, a video showing burning and smashed-in vehicles. He titled this installation Home. The overt sense of confrontation and anger that can be witnessed in this work has since given way to a “quiet rage” that can be seen in the NGV exhibition, which the artist attributes to the project’s gradual evolution over his two years of working on it.

With the new exhibition in Melbourne, the earlier career of Ian Strange has been firmly put into storage, along with his alter identity Kid Zoom. In this former guise he practiced as a street artist in Perth, before relocating to New York after being taken under the tutelage of graffiti master Ron English. Yet, as Strange came to realise, graff culture is inherently an inner-city animal, one nourished by an urban upbringing and, more often than not, urban-placed agitation. Thus for Strange, who grew up in the heart of Australian suburbia, a disconnection developed between his street art identity and his own personal story. As the artist identifies it, street art was initially an outlet for his angst as a discontented youth, but something proved to be amiss: “I realised I had nothing to contribute… so I went back to that source motivation, that attachment to the suburbs”.

Suburban is the decisive realisation of this realisation. While his geographical subject is America, Strange removes national boundaries by tapping in to a widely encountered dissatisfaction with the social structures intertwined in the architecture of the suburbs. By painting, burning and documenting these carefully-selected commonplace houses, Ian Strange makes a move to rephrase the visual jargon of middle-class life. In America, in Australia, in wherever.

And despite the artist’s platform shift from back alleyways to public institutions, the viewer can still witness the practice of a street artist in both the methods and motivations employed in this exhibition. It is just that nowadays his art exists with the full endorsement of the authorities, including local fire-fighters in America (with whom he became quite chummy) and the National Gallery of Victoria. In a work entitled Corrinne Terrace, which shows a house painted all black except for a white void around the front window, we see, according to Strange, the future direction of his examination of suburbia. It is an immensely calm work; there are no smashed-in Holden Commodores here. It will be interesting to see where he takes this project next.

 

Ian Strange: Suburban shows at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square, from July 27.
 

ngv.vic.gov.au

 

Images:

1. Ian Strange Lake Road. 2012 Archival Digital Print from SUBURBAN Collection of the Artist, New York

2. Ian Strange. Harvard Street 2011. Archival digital print Collection of the artist, New York

3. Ian Strange. Corinne Terrace 2011. Archival digital print. Collection of the artist, New York

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