New York-based artist Ian Strange returns for the world premiere of his latest exhibition ‘ISLAND’ at Fremantle Arts Centre (FAC), Western Australia. Raised in the Perth suburbs, Strange is known for his subversive, site-specific interventions on suburban houses.
Created in the wake of the American housing crisis, ‘ISLAND’ offers a provocative and unsettling look at our deep psychological relationship to home featuring large-scale photographs of three interventions on foreclosed suburban houses in Ohio’s Rust Belt region. Working with the foreclosed houses of America, historic buildings in an economically stagnant Poland and Christchurch’s earthquake ravaged homes – Strange explores home as a universal ideal. His darkly surreal installations have seen the artist encase buildings in wallpaper, black out entire houses with paint and install a crash-landed home outside the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Ian Strange, SOS, 2015-2017, archival digital print
Approaching the iconic symbol of the suburban home through the metaphor of the desert island – a place of refuge, protection and personal sovereignty but simultaneously entrapment and isolation – Strange carried out his signature ‘interventions’ on three houses which from the outside, perfectly embody the ideals of the American Dream. Painting the words “SOS”, “RUN” and “HELP” in giant lettering on these buildings, Strange exposes the darker truth belying their perfect exteriors.
These powerful statements point to the inherent instability of the home that much of Strange’s work reveals. The values of family, community and safety are built into the architecture of the suburban home but Strange highlights how, for many, that’s intrinsically fragile or entirely false.
For this exhibition Strange has adopted a new multi-disciplinary approach, presenting a sculptural house deconstruction made from the removed side of a now-demolished home in New Jersey, photographs he has marked with ink and paint, and found artefacts collected at the intervention sites.
‘ISLAND’ also includes a major new site-specific installation. Working within one of FAC’s galleries, Strange will create a large-scale sculptural intervention based on an abstracted house framework.
“I’ve always been interested in looking at the home as an island – simultaneously a place of safety and refuge, but also a space where you can become trapped and wish to escape,” said Strange. “By incorporating these now-demolished American homes and presenting my research and artefacts I want to reveal the home’s vulnerability and to question it as a symbol of stability.”
Fremantle Arts Centre
22 July to 16 September, 2017
Western Australia