Our latest online feature, Welcome to the Dreamhouse by Amy Carkeek, examines the American neoliberal dream’s influence on Australia and our increasing aspiration for homeownership and the commodified good life. The work employs the suburban gothic to interrogate the dream’s decaying and anachronistic façade as conveyed through the suburban fantasy.
Through the found, readymade object and newly formed combinations, Welcome to the Dreamhouse seeks to disclose the hollow embellishments of the commodity object’s surface, its construction of sentimentalised childhood narratives, and our collective denial for the dream’s illusory exterior.
Welcome to the Dreamhouse is visually seductive, with the darkness of its undercurrents corroding an appealing surface patina as childhood narratives are dismantled proven hollow as new dysfunctional realities emerge. At its heart, it is a reminder of the falsity of the objects to which we may aspire and the foundational narratives that drive our ‘wants’, with a salutary tale about the imperatives within change and the precarious nature of innocence.
– Louise Martin-Chew [catalogue essay writer]
Image: Amy Carkeek, Little boy blue, 2016. Archival inkjet print, 120 x 80cm
Edition of 5
