The “home” is our first “first”— where milestones of our development occur, where hearts are broken then mended, and family dinners occur every night like clockwork. It is also the site where we develop a sense of trust about the world beyond the security of the home. Whether we’ve grown up in a “house” or a “home” they are stomping grounds of memories that some of us long to return to while others wish they could forget. Inevitably, we are shaped by these locations that mark our personal growth and the influence of these spaces manifests into the person we become, for better or for worse.
In 2011 Australian born and New York based artist Ian Strange, known as Kid Zoom, created a site-specific installation titled Home in Cockatoo Island, Turbine Hall in Sydney, Australia. Within the massive space, Kid Zoom recreated the facade of his childhood home in painstaking detail. From the popcorn exterior stucco, weathered pipes, rusted roofing, loose fuses peaking out from the circuit breaker, and the particular shade of green on the front lawn, Home required an intense dissection of the artist’s past channeled through adolescent memory and research. The modest replica points to the artist’s humble roots, but the presence of his signature skull tag on the exterior wall suggests that the past cannot be rewritten, but recreating the past is a cathartic experience. Parked outside of Home are three red Holden Commodores parked fender to bumper to fender. Whether this model car holds a personal significance to Kid Zoom, each one has been thoroughly destroyed with dismembered rear view mirrors, shattered windshields, graffiti tags, and then set ablaze. While Kid Zoom literally reconstructs his childhood in the prestigious Turbine Hall, it is evident that the past is still very much alive within his work. As William Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Video by Kid Zoom