Extra credit: Angelica

The “…After the Suburbs: Artwork from the Post Cookie-Cutter Landscape” exhibit, curated by Karen Tauches at the Kiang Gallery invites viewers to take a closer look at the original role of the suburbs as an escape from the chaos of the city and how it has evolved. The suburbs compose a major part of the built environment, yet they are not acknowledged as being important to it. In the exhibit pieces I picked for this sketchbook assignment, the artists had creative interpretations of what we see when we drive around the suburbs and what happens to suburbs when they are not maintained as originally intended.

One of my favorite pieces was the painting Island by Meg Aubrey. In this painting, Aubrey illustrates the perfectly trimmed and structured plants that exist in suburban traffic islands. The landscaping is very controlled yet isolated from nature, almost synonymous with the suburb itself. In the class readings, we learned how people moved to the suburbs to get away from the chaos of city life and live in country-like settings, closer to nature. From this painting we can see that the street is curvilinear because the traffic island has a slight curve to it. There are no sidewalks and the street is not even defined. Like Frederick Law Olmstead’s landscape designs of curving roads without sidewalks so they blended with the environment, this piece shows the intrusion of the built environment on nature by making it conform to our paved streets, signs, and property lines. In a way, this representation of the traffic island reveals that the suburb is an island of itself, separate from the city and the country, creating its own type of contemporary built environment.

Contrary to the trimmed landscaping of the suburbs are the James Griffioen photographs of Feral Houses abandoned suburban homes with overgrown vegetation. This piece brought to mind Paul Gorth’s and Todd W. Bressi’s chapter from Understanding Ordinary Landscapes. In chapter 1 “Frameworks for Cultural Landscape Study,” they state “landscape denotes the interaction of people and place” and that “cultural landscape studies focus most on the history of how people have used everyday space to establish their identity, articulate their social relations, and derive cultural meaning.” Seeing the photographs of abandoned homes with overgrowing greenery made me think about the interaction that residents must have had once with the place and how the site now tells a cultural story of the social issues that led residents to abandon the homes. In order for suburbs to look orderly and structured they require a lot of maintenance and labor from the residents. Homes cannot maintain themselves because nature is overpowering. The photograph also shows how suburbs are victims of cultural factors such as poverty, crime, and the economy. Both the house and the landscape express the story of a once thriving suburban area put aside and forgotten (as suburbs tend to go unnoticed) with a fate determined by the real estate market.

The third piece I enjoyed was Xing Danwen’s photograph of a sales-office model unit in China, revealing how the ideal of the American suburbs has been exported as a new standard of living. In this photograph, the housing unit is completely enclosed from the outside with a fence and lined trees for privacy, creating its own “oasis” with a pool, landscaping, and a very spacious house. The size of the house in relation to the one figure looking out from the balcony shows how the suburban home is much larger and elaborate than necessary for the basic everyday living. The almost park-like setting of the yard exemplifies the rising standards of commodities that require constant and expensive maintenance. It is reminiscent of the Disneyland readings where the American suburbs can create a fantasy world for leisure and escape, but in the controlled environment of the home.