Zoom, Consume, Boom ; Bye-Bye, Reply, Awry ; Humming, Forthcoming ; Disguise, Surprise ; Seaside Stride, Pride Confide

The suburbs continue to be a touchstone for modern Australia. As one of the most urbanised nations in the world, the suburban sprawl characteristic of our cities and towns defines the texture of the majority of Australian lives. The outward growth of suburbs from the centres puts pressure on our cities, yet there is no abatement of appetite for the home ownership that drives their spread - the post war Great Australian Dream inferred in the title of this exhibition, Suburban Dreams. While their perceived aspirational and bourgeois ordinariness has been both pilloried and celebrated, the experience of the suburbs is a normal reality for artists as it is for most others and, as an experience, one so much more authentic than the landscape tradition which is still sentimentally and iconographically supreme in Australian culture. Suburban Dreams transforms urban artistic visions into alternate realities with strong individual eccentricities by artists for whom the suburbs are unashamedly their subject. Kendal Murray’s miniature diorama-style artworks are reflected back at the viewer with mirrors to indicate the universality of the urban narrative. People, nature and the shared experiences of shopping, picnicking, the beach and socialising, are painstakingly rendered, stories which engage us in worlds that echo our own. The exhibition 'Suburban Dreams' was shown 7 August - 13 September 2015, at the Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie.