In ‘Home,’ Little Boxes Full of Dreams
Review by Jessica Dawson, Washington Post, June 6, 2002.
Suburbia may be the scourge of urban planners, environmentalists and urbanites, but it's creative fuel for Kevin MacDonald. All but one of the artist's 14 works on paper in his solo exhibition, "Home," at David Adamson Gallery portray tract house conformity with improbable poetry.
Sure, his lonely, boxlike buildings, of the kind built in the '40s and '50s when indistinguishable equaled glorious, describe the darker aspects of planned communities. But deep down he's a nostalgic guy, and the now-dead dreams those houses represent are honored here.
Communities like Levittown, N.Y. -- the well-known products of the postwar suburban boom -- fueled this body of work. Back then, housing shortages were met by savvy developers whose communities fed veterans' needs for cheap housing, fast. Those many thousands of single-family homes offered owners deliverance from the city's crumbling infrastructure, its poor public transportation and its crime. If escapes could be hatched on subdivision parcels, it's no wonder Levittowns and their ilk mushroomed.
Later, of course, sprawl arrived, with its attendant congestion and pollution. Families disintegrated despite the patina of togetherness. The suburban dream, if not an all-out failure, proved no more accessible than El Dorado.
But MacDonald isn't issuing the dreamers a comeuppance. The suburban tendency may have been naive, but it marks a universal yearning for escape.
MacDonald's houses seem washed with age and nostalgia, like old photographs. He uses tea and coffee, the staples of so many suburban mornings, to stain many of the works; their presence reminds us of nourishment and togetherness. Simple family life seems like a worthy goal.
Still, one senses a troubling aspect of MacDonald's houses, each as unique as a Monopoly token. All traces of humans have been removed from front yards and driveways -- no people or cars, nary a swing set or mower.
There are just a few mounds of manicured shrubbery. The structures, too, are shorn of even utilitarian stuff that might pass for ornament -- no gutters to divert rainfall; few windows have shutters.
Reduced to simple boxes, the houses take on traits varying from garden-variety antisocial to bluntly disturbed. Ranch-style or split-level, the homes are lonely; a few seem paranoid. Empty windows become all-seeing eyes engaged in dumb, robotic surveillance.
When several houses meet in one frame, each seems wary of the others, as if Neighborhood Watch were lived to an extreme. Here MacDonald digs into the strangeness of our yearnings for perfection and the vigilance required to maintain it.