This Ian Strange Installation Will Turn an Inner-City Melbourne Home Into an Artwork
The Richmond house will be lit-up with a projection and feature galleries in the rooms.
There's plenty of people who go around collecting art and putting it in their house. But how about turning your home itself into an artwork?
That's exactly what Aussie-born, New York-based artist Ian Strange will be doing this weekend in Richmond. For this Saturday and Sunday only, he's projecting a site-specific illumination onto a family home on Clifton Street. Passersby will see a huge red dot covering the doorway, framed by concentric circles: a bit like an interpretation of the eye of a dartboard.
Titled OPEN HOME, the work aims to explore ideas of suburban isolation. On one hand, the home appears as a shelter — on the other, it is vulnerable and at risk of demolition. The piece is one of many by Strange investigating the meaning and architecture of the buildings in which we live.
While creating the illumination on Monday, October 2, Strange documented the process in detail. The result is a collection of photographs titled Twenty-Five, which will be on display in the home's front bedroom, next to another series called Forty-Eight.
Meanwhile, spread across the other bedrooms, bathroom and living room, you'll find Shadows, a group of photographs and videos that Strange created in Western Australia during 2015 and 2016. The former explore changes to post-war red-brick dwellings, while the latter document Strange at work in the light of dawn.
Rounding out the exhibition are two sculptures. Elliot Terrace (2013) features a cut from a New Jersey home that's since been demolished, while Framework (Kenyon 3) (2017) is from a series of site-specific installations that explore the role of frameworks and architectural drawings in the creation and imagining of homes.
OPEN HOME is located at 25 Clifton Street, Richmond and will be open from 10am – 6pm on Saturday, October 7 and Sunday, October 8. For more info on the series, visit ianstrange.com.
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