Melbourne’s hot urban planning issues are up for debate in Monash Gallery of Art’s current exhibition.
Paul Dunn’s Imagined Communities presents a series of striking colour photographs documenting the new housing estates spreading across the outskirts of Australia’s largest cities.
Imagined Communities is interested in the way that new suburban developments promise a world of inclusiveness and community to residents.
Dunn’s photographs record the advertising signage that promotes new housing developments as well as estates under construction.
While housing estates such as Caroline Springs and Sanctuary Lakes sell “ready-made” concepts of social cohesion and family safety, which are often worlds away from the diverse realities of contemporary communities, the evidence of the developments themselves more often than not reveals paranoia, anxiety and isolation.
“The dark secrets of housing debt, of schools too far, of loneliness, of the realities of sameness and choice are ominous shadows, looming around the pools of light,” Kate Driscoll, lecturer in Global Studies, Social Science & Planning at RMIT, said of the photographs.
Imagined Communities is on display alongside MGA’s major summer exhibition Building as Muse, which surveys the extraordinary collaboration of two of the icons of Australia’s cultural history, the photographer Max Dupain and the eminent architect Harry Seidler.
There is an artist’s talk with Paul Dunn at 3.00pm Saturday 16 January 2010. To book, call 03 8544 0503.
The exhibition will run until 24 January 2010.
