ESSAY <<
As they are now, the American suburbs can be seen as a ridiculous battleground between consumer marketing and Nature. One might perceive--especially after the collapse of the real estate market in 2008 and an influx of natural disasters in 2010--that Nature can indeed win. Corporate graphics, mass produced residential products, cement, and neat shrubbery sprawl out and attempt to dominate meadow--like empty lots. New trees that decorate parking lots grow to maturity despite vacancy of tenants. To drive along the highways leaving city centers is to see mountainsides layered with a rainbow of unused billboards. Passé strip malls are repurposed as thrift stores, community centers, and ethnic restaurants--yet, the violence of the highway still growls close by. These scenarios give us clues to the future.
After all, the suburbs promised to be an affordable Eden. It was that in-between station where middle class, industialized citizens could be part of the city, yet breathe a little easier knowing the countryside was nearby. When gas was cheap and the cities were wild with crime and other unpredictabilities, the highways were magnificent bridges to dreamy clusters of private property. Perhaps it was a certain proximity to nature that exacerbated the paranoia of actually opening up to it: the suburbs mutated into a caricature of natural environments with notoriously perfect, bright green lawns, maniacally symmetrical gardening, and subdivision signs reminiscent of medieval castle gates. It seems that a certain fear of the natural environment underlies its present architecture.
But, this artificial, anti-social landscape, which attempts to colonize independent small-town life at the fringe of cities is beginning to show new developments. Although there is still formidable anti-suburban snobbery, thinkers like architect Ellen Dunham-Jones and artist Julia Christensen invite intellectuals, city planners and architects to acknowledge the majority of our built environment. Why not redesign the suburbs? Parking lots can become public gardens and piazzas. “Big boxes” can become community centers. Cookie-cutter yards can be used to grow fields of clover and organic produce. The internet highway may eventually replace the actual highways as the place for daily travel. Might we fantasize about a day when heinous rush hour
traffic is a relic of the past . . .?
The suburbs will change a lot in this next century. Certainly a less commercialized hybrid of urban and green would be ideal.
The artworks in this exhibition graze the surface of a gigantic subject, identifying visual tropes of the suburban mythology, unconscious messages and also glimpses of the future. Presented in a city, whose identity is forever entwined with suburban development, I invite visitors to imagine what might happen ”. . .After" the great suburban age. --kt