Ian Strange: Burn series - SUBURBAN
Burn series is a part of a larger body of work entitled SUBURBAN. Over two years Strange worked with a film crew and volunteers in Ohio, Detroit, Alabama, New Jersey, New York and New Hampshire to create, photograph and film site specific interventions incorporating suburban homes. The recording of these interventions through photographic documentation forms the basis of this work.
The most dramatic of all his approaches, however, is the Burn Series in which, with the involvement of the fire department in Ohio, houses were set alight and burned to the ground in an act of symbolic requital; the surviving record of their existence being Strange’s art-directed photographic documentation.
Strange’s photographs and videos challenge the idea of the family home as a place of warmth and safety by simultaneously elevating and destroying it, both literally and figuratively. In doing so, Strange reveals his own antithetical relationship with the suburbs and invites us to explore our own response to them.
Excerpt from - Ian Strange: SUBURBAN
By David Hurlston and Polly Smith
(Originally published by the National Gallery of Victoria, July 24th 2013)
