Suburbia is the stuff of nostalgia and nightmares. Recent trends in town planning have marked a shift against private and demarcated plots that characterise the sprawling homogeneity of picket-fenced peripheries. More contemporary urban developments illustrate a renewed interest in public and community-oriented spaces and infrastructure. It is not cars, but computers that capture the technological zeitgeist, and since we can take our screens with us, people nowadays are keen to get out of the house and have more meaningful collective experiences in shared spaces. Thus, suburbia is an aptly critical and playful premise for the inaugural exhibition at Cement Fondu, a new arts space in Sydney that aims to vary and vivify the way we engage with arts, culture and each other.
Curatorially, ‘Suburbia’ examines complex political issues that are literally close to home, such as migration and colonisation. Deep connections between identity and place are emphasised in works by Tangentyere artists Nerine Tilmouth, Louise Daniels and Elizabeth Nampitjinpa, whose paintings reflect the daily life of artists in Town Camps. There is a sense of pride and ownership evident in the strong relationship between the figures in the paintings and their locations, whether that is on Country, at the local supermarket, or in the artist’s own doorway.
Nerine Tilmouth, Cowboys Playing Eagles at Laramba, 2015, acrylic on wood, 60 x 80cm. Courtesy Tangentyere Artists and Cement Fondu, Sydney
Examining suburbia from culturally diverse perspectives, Caroline Garcia and Shahmen Suka take an intersectional and diasporic approach to their investigations of the performative body. Sweatshop Western Sydney have produced a series of new audio works that exemplify their socially engaged mission by drawing on the overlapping strengths of art and advocacy to amplify the voices of marginalised communities in the west.
Suburbia, both as a concept and a lived experience, will always have a political resonance as result of the divergent ways in which societies organise the built environment to reflect the inequalities of its population. Fraught tensions between class and suburbs have extra bite for the local audience of Cement Fondu, given the impact of unscrupulously predatory housing loans on the 2008 global financial crisis, in combination with Sydney’s real estate neurosis. Works such as Amalia Ulman’s White Flag Emoji (2015) series speak
to the anxieties that surround status and neighbourhood.
Chris Dolman, My Shadows’ Ghost Plays Trips, 2017, oil on paper, mounted on Marine Ply, ceramics, 155 x 115cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie pompom, Sydney
The gravity of the exhibition’s more contentious elements is balanced by an idiosyncratically Australian humour that appears at once to be self-deprecatory and celebratory. Chris Dolman’s cartoonish works playfully extend the body beyond its physical limits and hint at narratives with a darkly absurdist undertone. As collaborators and friends, Rosie Deacon and Emily Crockford take over Cement Fondu’s Project Space with a dynamic and painterly flourish of colour, populated by Australian plants and animals. This installation forms an exciting and inviting garden where audience members can spend time exploring the vast scale and elaborate details of Deacon and Crockford’s reinterpretation of the gallery’s own locality, Paddington.
‘Suburbia’ combines diverse art forms and practices with complex references to location and temporality in order to reframe divisions between the familiar and strange. The show rewards those curious enough to step outside the confines of their own backyard.
Giselle Stanborough is an artist and writer based in Sydney.
Cement Fondu
Until 29 April, 2018
Sydney
