The John Curtin Gallery presents Western Australian artist Ian Strange as a highlight of the visual arts program of the 2020 Perth Festival.
Opening in early February 2020 in the Gallery’s Bunuru season, with contrasting visions of the suburban, the exhibition clearly reflects the 2020 Festival’s celebration of ‘place and home’.
Ian Strange: Suburban Interventions 2008 – 2020 is the first ever large-scale survey of the artist’s photographic and film work. It represents a comprehensive overview of the past 12 years of his thought provoking practice, featuring full suites of the most iconic photographic work as well as three rarely seen films that collectively explore the enigma of the suburban.
Strange, who was born in Western Australia, now lives and works between New York and Melbourne. He is best known for community-based monumental site-specific suburban intervention projects and has worked with communities in the US and New Zealand in recent years to transform full-scale residential homes to reveal layers of experience and aspiration often hidden behind the conventional facades of normality of suburban life. The artist’s ambitious onsite transformations of full-scale residential homes resonate with the trauma and impact of natural disaster as well as unfulfilled dreams of communities living through profound financial despair on the fringes of an elusive suburban utopia.
John Curtin Gallery Director Chris Malcolm said Strange explores our palpable concepts of home, place and belonging, only to subvert the familiar, shifting us into unsettling, strange and unaccustomed perspectives.
“The John Curtin Gallery is thrilled to present for the very first time such an ambitious survey exhibition of Ian Strange’s practice which features a number of his iconic photographic suites and largely unseen film works. His large-scale photographic work and the documentation of his community-based projects will offer Perth audiences a very familiar starting point that reveals a compelling vision of the suburban with which to question their own relationship to home and country and consider what suburban life means to them,” he said.
The exhibition sits alongside the powerful Mia Kurrum Maun (Far from Home), a selection of work by acclaimed Noongar artist Sandra Hill that includes new work created especially for the Perth Festival. A comprehensive public program will accompany both exhibitions.
Ian Strange: Suburban Interventions 2008 – 2020CARSTEN HÖLLER AND MÅNS MÅNSSON CARSTEN HÖLLER AND MÅNS MÅNSSON
7 February – 24 April 2020
A Perth Festival event
Public Program: There will be a public program in support of each exhibition. Details will be posted on the John Curtin Gallery website www.jcg.curtin.edu.au and the Gallery’s facebook page.
JOHN CURTIN GALLERY Curtin University, Building 200A, Kent St, Bentley Western Australia
OPEN Mon-Fri 11am-5pm | Saturday 8, 15, 22 & 29 February 12-4pm | Sunday 12-4pm
FREE ENTRY
T +61 8 9266 4155
W johncurtingallery.curtin.edu.au
