Because suburbia occupies a dominant presence in so many lives—a place of not only residence but also of work, commerce, worship, education, and leisure—it has become a focal point for competing interests and viewpoints. The suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. more
Drawn Here: Sean Griffiths of FAT
Target Free Thursday Nights
Thursday, March 6 7:00 pm
Escape to the Suburbs!
Free First Saturday
Saturday, April 5 10:00 am to 3:00 pm
Next Exit: The Shifting Landscape of Suburbia
Target Free Thursday Nights
Thursday, April 24 7:00 pm
All essays are originally from the companion book for this exhibition, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. Some essays appear in excerpted form where noted.
American, b. 1970, Iowa City, Iowa; lives and works in Washington, D.C.
The work of Benjamin Edwards is situated in the imagined space between utopia and dystopia, the dream and the nightmare. His visually complex, layered, and colorful canvases are the result of meticulously selecting, collaging, and composing the signs and symbols of contemporary society. Drawing upon the architecture of suburbia, the artist recognizes the social effects of ever newer and faster technologies and denser, more integrated and branded global economies and their inevitable endpoint: the mass saturation of our lives and what he describes as the “monocultural leveling which spreads with the goal of perfect uniformity.” The artist received his master’s degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and also studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has been shown at the Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York; Galerie Jean-Luc & Takako Richard, Paris; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; and included in exhibitions at institutions such as Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; the Cleveland Art Museum; Artist Space, New York; and P.S. 1/MoMA Center for Contemporary Art, Long Island City, New York.
We asked people to make a video telling us about the suburbs and put it on YouTube. Selected videos are showing in the gallery at the Walker Art Center during the run of the exhibition.
Do you live in a suburb? Do you work or go to school in one? What is your experience of the “burbs? ”…
Whether you love them or hate them we’re interested in your thoughts on the phenomenon of the American suburb. We invite you to make a 5-minute video about strip malls, cul-de-sacs, office parks, and green lawns or whatever suburbia means to you. A select number of videos will be chosen to screen as part of the exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes in the Target Gallery from February 15 to May 18, 2008.
To participate, upload your video to YouTube and add the tag “walkerworldsaway” or post it as a response to our video above. We’ll feature all videos on the Walker’s YouTube page. To be considered for gallery screening, entries must be 5 minutes or less and be online by January 18, 2008.