Review

A review of Faraway Nearby • Addressing Suburbia

Installation view of "Faraway Nearby • Addressing Suburbia," at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College through May 16, 2010, showing: (foreground) Brian Tolle, "Pinko," Communist-era finial and platinum silicon rubber, 2009, courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York, NY; (mid-ground) Brian Tolle, "Out of Service," crutches and platinum silicon rubber, 2009, courtesy of the artist and CRG Gallery, New York, NY; and (background) Greg Stimac, "Oak Lawn, IL (man)," 2010, and other archival pigment prints, courtesy Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago, Illinois. Photo: courtesy of the museum. Click on the image for more information from the museum.

Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art
at Johnson County Community College
Overland Park, Kansas
February 26 — May 16, 2010

Faraway Nearby at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art presents nine angles on suburbanism through bodies of work made by artists in their early 30s to mid-40s — artists who have known life in America since an era when suburban lifestyle prevailed. A lively discourse takes form through a variety of mediums, and photography dominates the exhibition.

Amy Stein, "Trasheaters," digital C-print, 2005, courtesy of ClampArt, New York, NY. Image: courtesy of the museum

Amy Stein’s photos recreate true tales of animal interlopers from suburban Northeast Pennsylvania. In this moderately sized series of photographs she calls Domesticated, lighting and color are hammed up. The slight awkwardness of animal poses and overacting on the part of humans tip off the audience, letting us know these are staged shots. Stein artfully positions taxidermied wild animals in manmade environs… just outside the window of a home or the fence around a backyard pool.

Painter Chris Ballantyne imagines crowded, zoning-free neighborhoods of houses. There, multiple added wings congest suburban blocks to the point that most windows could only look directly into rooms of other homes; as roof-masses converge, naturalism gives way to domination of abstract shape in several compositions. Ballantyne goes in the opposite direction with an economically painted mural where sea has overtaken the landscape and only small isle vestiges of suburbia remain.

Aerial photos in the exhibition document Matthew Moore’s earthwork statements about the suburban developments that are consuming the acreage his family has farmed for four generations. For his Rotations series, Moore planted 35 acres of sorghum and wheat in a scaled configuration based on blueprints for a community to be built on land purchased from his family.

Don Lambert’s explorations include one year’s worth of varied mowing patterns on his own property. In the studio, this has translated to a very tactile group of works titled Lawn Jobs wherein he approximates the back and forth of the mower on tableaux such as Deere John by switching the direction of artificial turf so it catches light differently and appears striped.

Installation view, "Faraway Nearby • Addressing Suburbia,"showing: (background, left to right) Don Lambert, "Heaven Looking Down" and "Deere John," both artificial turf on maple plywood, 2009, courtesy of the artist; and (foreground) Don Lambert, "One Cubic Yard" (from a series of three cubic yards), artificial turf on maple plywood, dolly, 2009, courtesy of the artist. Photo: courtesy of the museum

Just outside the gallery are Greg Stimac’s half dozen plain-looking photos of homeowners pushing or riding mowers. Sources of fascination here are comparison of mowing methods, the matter that lawn mowing is a task Americans across the nation perform regularly in warmer months, and the range of green to parched in lawns depicted.

Michael Vahrenwald shows large, life-sized nighttime photos of turf from the sides of big box store parking lots — lit only with the lighting available onsite. Some compositions show an inviting carpet, others are strewn with weeds or small rocks; the spare, grassy rise or fall of land beyond a curb and dissipation of detail into dark holds the viewer’s attention as would a too-close view of some unfamiliar world.

Seven documentary photos by Paho Mann depict re-inhabited Circle K convenience stores, all with the same building design. Mann explains that many of the thousands of original Circle K stores moved to new locations during the ‘80s and ‘90s as part of a corporate business strategy. Using old phone books, he found former Circle Ks and created a suite of photos wherein he catalogs the locations as they now exist, showing them all frontally from the same distance.

Sheila Pree Bright, "Untitled 40," chromogenic print, 2009, courtesy of the artist. Image: courtesy of the museum

In photos that range from large to mid-scale, Sheila Pree Bright presents the lifestyle of black middle class America through views of rooms where scattered belongings and choice in art or periodicals suggest the family living there is African American; an inhabitant is sometimes observable in a photo’s unfocused periphery. Bright makes use of a narrow depth of field, often letting bright, out-of-focus areas suggest an opulent quality.

Situated by the exhibition’s exit are the conspicuous, draped rubber houses of Brian Tolle. All five were cast from the same mold of a Levittown house — a house from one of the first suburbs, the Levittowns that were created in the middle of the last century (at the same time the first Circle Ks were built and where African Americans were not permitted to purchase homes, by the way). Tolle’s skins of houses are held up on crutches, supported by a flagpole, slung over a tire swing …. The message in an example not shown is humorous and more poignant: a large, relaxed house barely contained in the seat of a Lazy-Boy appears to take a rest from its responsibility to shelter.

-re-

Popularity: 6% [?]

Updating...