Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes

WawHeadline

Walker Art Center,
February 16 - August 17, 2008

Carnegie Museum of Art,
October 4, 2008 - January 18, 2009

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

Exhibition Photos

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Essays

EssaysHeadline

All essays are originally from the companion book for this exhibition, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. Some essays appear in excerpted form where noted.



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Artists

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Chris Ballantyne

American, b. 1972, Mobile, Alabama; lives and works in New York

Chris Ballantyne’s landscape paintings and prints often take a bird’s eye view of man-made forms set in expansive planes of grass or ocean. Jetties, swimming pools, fences, parking lots, and tract homes are common subjects; and although these constructions are so ubiquitous in our everyday lives as to be mundane, the artist subtly twists the logic of their forms, rendering them as entirely uncanny. Pools are surrounded by mounds of dirt instead of homes, fences dead-end without enclosing a yard, parking lots exist autonomously without linking to roads, and houses grow into multiple wings that connect with each other at improbable angles. The familiar geometries of rooftops and parking lines are thus rendered abstract—their lat planes of color appear as both a diagram and a dream. Ballantyne’s aesthetic was influenced by his family’s many moves during his childhood across the southern coast of the United States for his father’s work with the U.S. Coast Guard. His experience living in various suburban areas gave him a sense of the homogeneity of residential development across the country as well as an awareness of expanding urban areas gradually encroaching on the natural landscape and ways that suburban development is primarily determined by emphatic borders around private property. Since earning his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002, the artist has been interested in creating an “uneasy sense of quiet” through paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and murals in which an uninhabited architecture is arranged to interrogate the balance between nature and culture.



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Video

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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.

Selected Videos

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Original Submission Call

See YouTube video call

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.



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Lexicon

LexiconHeadline
A
Adaptive Reuse
Alligator
Anchor Store
Asphalt Nation
Auto Park
B
Baby Boomer
Ball Pork
BANANA
Bedroom Community
Big Box
Blandburb
Boomburb
Brownfield
Burbed-out
C
Carchitecture
Category Killer
Centaur
Chain Store
Chameleon
Claritas
Cloverleaf
Cluster
Collector Road
Community Interest Development
Compact Land Use
Crunchy Suburb
Cul-de-sac
Cup-holder Cuisine
Curb Appeal
D
Dead Mall
Deeded Community
Discount Department Store
Disneyfication
Drive-thru
Drive Til You Qualify
Drosscape
Duck
E
Edge City
Edifice Rex
Empty Nester
Ethnoburb
Exurb
F
Family Room
Fast Food
Fast Food Cluster
First Ring
Food Court Druid
G
Garage
Garage Band
Garage Mahal
Gated Community
Greenfield
Greenway
Greyfield
Gridlock
Group Attributes
Growth Machine
H
High Density
Home Office
Home Owner Association
HOV Lane
I
Infill
Inner Ring
L
Landfill
Leapfrog
Lifestyle Commuter
Light Rail
Logo Building
Low Density
LULU
M
Mall Rat
McMansion
Media Room
Megaburb
Megachurch
Megasite
Minivan
Mixed-use Development
Monster Home
N
NASCAR Dad
Nerdistan
New Suburbanism
New Urbanism
NIMBY
Node
No Growth
Noise Barrier
Non-place
NORC
NOTE
O
Office Park
Outer-ring Suburb
Outlet Store
Outparcel
Ozoner
P
Park and Ride
Patio Man
Pedestrian-friendly
Peter Pan Suburb
Picture Window
Pod
Pork Chop
Power Center
Privatopia
Property Owner Association
Q
Quality of Life
R
Ranchburger
Re-anchor
Realtor Mom
Recent Changes
Ring Road
Roundabout
S
SLAPP Suit
Slow Growth
Smart Growth
Snout House
Soccer Mom
SOHO
Speed Bump
Sprawl
Sprawl Stress Syndrome
Spread City
Sprinkler City
Starter Castle
Streetcar Suburb
Strip Mall
Subdivision
Suburban Plantation
Superstore
SUV
T
Tank Farm
Technoburb
Telecommute
Terms
Theme Park
Theming
TOAD
Tower Farm
Tract Mansion
Trailer Park
V
Value Retailer
W
Walmartization
Warehouse Club
Weekend Home
Weekend Warrior
White Flight
Wigger
Willow Syndrome
Y
Yea it is That Way
Z
Zillow
Zoomburb


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