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A Peripheral Life
Ian Strange’s suburbia
Artist Ian Strange’s 2011 HOME installation in the Turbine Hall at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum. (All photos: Ian Strange)
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Artist Ian Strange was born and raised in the suburbs of Perth‚ Australia’s fourth most populous city‚ and its most isolated as well. Like much of Australia‚ Perth is a vast sprawl of a place, with 80 percent of its 1.9 million residents living‚ not within the city centre‚ but in its vast orbit of suburbs. It is an urban format that is both economically and environmentally extremely inefficient.
Strange says that it was the profound isolation and mundanity characterising Australian suburbia, that first drove him to become an artist. And his pedominantly site-specific works‚ with titles such as HOME and SUBURBAN, grapple explicitly with these issues.
Details from the full-scale replica of his childhood home that Strange created for HOME, based on his memories of growing up the suburbs of Perth. -
Now based in New York‚ he has also explored the theme across the states of Middle America. However, he notes that Australia’s remoteness adds a complexity to the suburban experience‚ creating a “deeply unnatural environment” unique within the western world. Strange has observed what he describes as a superficial sense of stability in suburbia coupled with a worrying dislocation from the continent′s landscape, an attitude which seems to be in part a hangover from the colonists who “discovered” it. “The suburbs are a large point of contention and really expose how much of Australian identity is in denial of our environment”‚ he says. “This is perhaps best illustrated by the existence of typical-looking suburban homes built near mining sites in far northwestern Australia. Although they look like any other house in a leafy suburb‚ these places require 24/7 air conditioning and perpetual watering to keep their front lawns green. There is an absurdity in seeing them next to the dry inland red dirt and in the unforgiving desert conditions. It highlights the contradiction of the suburban home in Australia and its symbolic and emotional power to white Australians.” p (fs)
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