Ian Strange is an architectural vandal, a provocateur who burns down condemned suburban houses, paints lurid targets on them, cuts into them, or covers them all in black.
The Australian artist has spent the past 15 years using the suburban home as a medium to question how we live, and to probe how economic and environmental forces press in on the suburban idyll. His subjects include gentrification and urban decay, surveillance and isolationism, the USA’s subprime mortgage crisis, and the 2011 Christchurch earth- quake.
Disturbed Home, the first monograph to bring together Strange’s architectural interventions, features photographs and film stills, preparatory drawings and installation views.
There are also two scholarly essays ruminating on the process and impact of Strange’s work. Britt Salvesen delves into the history of houses- as-art and considers Strange’s engagement with (and subversion of) suburban clichés. Kevin Moore traces Strange’s career from tagger in suburban Perth to international conceptual artist, describing how his tamper-ing with private abodes exploits the “unsanctioned intrusion” of graffiti to distort and disturb conventional attitudes about the meaning of home.
Disturbed Home conveys the poignancy and urgency of Strange’s work.
