Bonus Assignment: Wright

In the After the Suburbs exhibit, I was impressed by the notion of the common or everyday that has pervaded into our suburban lifestyles. The juxtaposition between the now-common palladian window with the notion of fear through the isolation behind the foil-covered windows was interesting in Sarah Hobbs' Avoidance. Similarly, Meg Aubrey's series, seen below, shows the everyday items from suburbia, the phone junction box, the for-sale sign, the mailbox, as works of individual art, but when removed from canvas and placed back in their natural environment, they are nothing unusual because there are hundreds of them in the thousands of neigborhoods around the country, and especially in the "series of smashed up suburbs" that combine to make up metro-Atlanta in the words of Karen Tauches. A stark contrast to the sculpted landscape elements that Aubrey conveyed were the numerous photos of the wasteland that has now become Detroit (one of which is shown in the last photo). In our rush to build "smashed up" neighborhoods in modern America, we lost the sense of neighborhoods as seen in earlier time periods, notably the Olmstead-influenced park communities. Yet, man's role in nature is seen in those images of Detroit--man's abandonment of the landscape has now allowed it to move back to its natural state, almost erasing man's existence. In other words, there is a certain balance in nature and the built environment that allows it to ebb and flow on a level greater than the common artifacts that man created and has now begun to leave behind--mailboxes, real estate signs, etc. Probably the most striking example of the everyday was the sound recordings playing throughout the gallery. I had assumed that they were naturally occuring right outside of the open door and not some recording from any other place at any other time.