
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. 1976, Euclid, Ohio; lives and works in Chicago
Greg Stimac’s photographic series explore quotidian typologies that include campfires, melting snowmen, roadside memorials to deceased loved ones, bottles of urine littered on the roadside, unregulated outdoor firing ranges, and the rituals of mowing the lawn. The repetition of a particular subject in unique contexts draws our eye to the comparative differences between images. For the series Mowing the Lawn, Stimac photographed various practices of lawn maintenance across the country, capturing the diversity of this most suburban of activities. The images disclose the variety of approaches to this quintessential American pastime: prideful seniors to bored teenagers, methodical precision to haphazard determination, riding mowers to electric mowers, lush manicured greens to dry xeriscapes. In 2005, Stimac received his bachelor’s degree in photography from Columbia College, Chicago, where he was awarded an Albert P. Weisman Memorial Fellowship. His photographs have been shown at Bucket Rider Gallery, Chicago; Crocker Art Museum Sacramento, California; Minnesota Center for Photography, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
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.