Ian Strange: Disturbed Home

Curated by Kevin Moore, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator

Ian Strange: Disturbed Home is a survey of the artist’s architectural interventions, including photographic and filmic interpretations of those structural works. Highlighting projects of the past twelve years and spanning geographies from Strange’s native Australia, to New Zealand, Japan, Poland, and the United States, including Cincinnati, Ohio, Strange’s provocative transformations of damaged or abandoned homes unlock themes of social upheaval and geographic displacement caused by a variety of factors—economic blight, environmental disaster, and social migrations.

In response to the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial: World Record, Strange is creating a new body of work in Cincinnati, highlighting the effects of environmental and economic conditions on homes in the region. In collaboration with the Hamilton County Landbank and assisted by students from the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Strange’s local interventions and their photographic documentation aim to generate discussion of Cincinnati history and the changing fates of neighborhoods, homes, and the populations who continue to dwell there.

Installed in the SITE 1212 galleries at the Art Academy, the exhibition includes photographs, films, and drawings presenting Strange’s unique artistic vision. Also included is a site-specific installation in the adjacent Art Academy Annex, offering further dimension to Strange’s longstanding engagement with ideas of home and domestic disturbance.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new monograph, Ian Strange: Disturbed Home (Damiani 2022), edited and with essays by Kevin Moore, artistic director and curator of FotoFocus, and Britt Salvesen, curator and head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.