Reduxing Suburbia with Kirchner

"The Redux series is comprised of 10 images photographed over the past two years of new suburban home construction in America," begins John Kirchner's statement about his latest work, on display at the Kim Foster Gallery until April 28. As banal as this subject may sound, Kirchner's portrayal of suburbia is sure to invoke a fury of emotions about the appearance of the greater American landscape.

Whether you think of suburbia as a beautiful representation of the American ideal, or whether you have already been appalled by its monotony, Kirchner's newest series of photographs is a definite must-see among the innumerable gallery exhibits in Chelsea.

Kirchner, born in Michigan in 1955, completed intensive studies of architecture both in America and abroad in Denmark and England. As a graduate of architecture studies, Kirchner's choice to study what he calls "the architect-less, culturally generic products" of American suburbia is particularly fascinating.

Despite small variations in their facades, each McMansion is essentially the same single-family detached home, with a prominent garage flanked by faultlessly sculpted bushes, a lamppost, or a mailbox. Kirchner has painstakingly centered every house in the frame, emphasizing the sickly perfection of the suburban landscape.

All of Kirchner's photographs are nearly identical in size and offer no hints as to their specific location, furthering the idea of incessant replication of the same house over and over again across the continent. Titling his photographs Redux I - Redux X, Kirchner has chosen to leave the suburbs nameless. Each of these houses could literally be located anywhere in America, with no attention paid to their surrounding environments and a complete absence of any architectural variation. Kirchner thus has successfully portrayed suburbia as a geographically unidentifiable location. Even the presence of a street sign in one of the photographs furthers this point-the street has not yet been named, and the generic green signpost remains blank.

A few of Kirchner's photographs capture the McMansions as they are being built, revealing unpainted wooden paneling or bright blue plastic tarp. These houses are surrounded by construction bins and bits of machinery scattered on red dug-up dirt. It is with these images that Kirchner questions the relationship between these new suburban houses and the landscape around them. Everything in the surrounding environment has been completely destroyed, soon to be replaced by pavement and patches of transplanted grass.

Kirchner shows how the American home buyer is obliterating the natural and replacing it with "a quasi-colonial, mindless phenotypic variant." By capturing the transition from open land to suburbia, Kirchner allows the viewer to see how commercialization of the American landscape has left the natural environment dead.

Despite the fact that these houses are family homes, Kirchner presents them as completely devoid of life. No child has trampled upon the perfectly maintained grass, no toy has been carelessly left in the driveway. Even the trees in the front yard, no doubt transplanted from a different environment, look dead and unhealthy in their artificial surroundings.

The freshly painted bright colors of some of the houses present a stark contrast with the ominous cloudy skies above them. Kirchner's choice of lighting and color contrasts presents an environment so artificial it is at first uncomfortable to look at, and then even disturbing. Kirchner himself describes the suburban home as being "repeated ad nauseam" across America, and indeed, it is not unlikely that the viewer will leave feeling nauseous from the landscape's absolute monotony.

Living in New York City, it easy to forget how the American landscape really looks. Kirchner's photographs will not only serve to remind you but also leave you questioning the growing suburbanization of the greater American environment.