Suburbanisms

SUBURBANISMS is a show I co-curated with a life long friend (Stephen Fan) for the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, CT in 2014. The show explores the Chinese immigrant casino worker community that lives in Uncasville, CT. Detailing how suburban homes have been rethought and reused for multifamily living, front lawn gardening, and frugal communal living in general. It also takes a look at how Chinese cultural norms play into their usage of space, notions of public and private life, the gambling industry in United States, American notions of the manicured front lawn ideal, and the workers themselves in the form of portraits. A lot of the approach in both concept and design, came from a desire to highlight different cultural perspectives as a means to illuminate and examine not only other cultural practices, but one’s own. This plays out from the most accessible, image/word juxtapositions, to pieces of the show’s title being “backwards” depending on which side of the glass your on, gallery room’s appearing to have white walls from one perspective, and walking the other way, appearing to have red walls, to more in-depth data visualizations.