Architizer News
Purging the American Dream
February 22, 2012
With the bursting of the real estate bubble and the recent American foreclosure crisis, the house, particularly the suburban home, has become a potent cultural emblem ripe for artistic seizure. One dilapidated house in Austin, Texas was recently rechristened as an immersive art project by Austin-based art collective Ink Tank. The project, called Last New Year, revolves not around the foreclosure crisis, but around a crisis of a grander and more mythical scale: the end of the world as predicted on the Mayan calendar. The artists described the large-scale installation as a celebration of the end, a study of crisis management, a search for meaning, a chance for closure, and “an unwavering column of truth in a desert of confusion.”
Perhaps the most resonant piece in the installation, as noted in Colossal, is a sculpture called The Purge. While many of the pieces in the house envision glorified and artfully tamed doomsday scenarios, artist Chris Whiteburch’s site-specific sculpture imagines how the physical house would react to the impending doom of 2012. Whiteburch shows the house purging its content, violently spewing structural materials and debris with a powerfully human sense of desperation.

[All photos courtesy Chris Whiteburch, photographers Julie and Nicole Blair, via Colossal]













