Ian Strange Escaped Street Art Before it Became Passé (And Is A Real Artist Now)

Ian Strange is one of those right place, right time people. Back when people were getting Banksy tattoos, the Perth-born, New York-based Strange was making his name as a street artist. Then, well before it all became passé, he made it out of the scene and into the grown up art world. Now Strange is a fully fledged, grown-up, collectable fine artist—not a gas mask in sight! Strange wouldn't say any of this himself, by the way. Over the course of our interview, he cleared a lot of things up, actually.

These days Strange's work centres around large-scale installations across the world—always suburban homes with some bizarre twist, say having giant chunks cut out of them so they look like Swiss Cheese. SHADOW is Strange's latest body of work, and the reason I'm on the phone with him today. In his team's words, it's a "photographic and film based exhibition of five site-specific interventions incorporating homes in suburban Perth, Western Australia."

That is to say: very nice pictures and videos of houses he painted black. Not just him, of course. It took a village to execute—builders, producers, gaffers, and directors. Because of this,we end up having that classic conversation about authorship: Does the artist have to make the art, or can they just have the idea?

All photographs courtesy Ian Strange.

VICE: Hey Ian. Culturally, when did street art's moment pass?
Ian Strange: I don't know. I'm not really involved anymore so it's hard to comment, but there did seem to be a big peak in 2009. That's when I found myself in New York, sort of caught up in all of that, but that time was actually a large motivator in me changing what I did as an artist.

Okay, can I say something bolder? Did it get corny?
I don't know if I'd characterise that as true, you know? It just is what it is. I haven't painted in that community in years. I mean, initially I loved the social aspect of it. I just liked painting with my friends. It wasn't to make money. But then, of course, it became this big commercial thing. It's easy to forget how interesting and exciting it was when it was new, and didn't have that commercialism attached to it. For me, it really was an incredible moment, but the commercialism has really taken the sheen off it. But street art was never all I did—I studied film, photography, installation, and combining all that into bigger projects. I was caught up in the street art bubble, that boom, almost as a matter of timing.

On timing, why was now the right time for you to return home as an artist, and make work in Perth?
For me, it was an opportunity to go back to where I grew up and look at those suburbs again. Those really iconic red brick suburban homes are disappearing, getting demolished in the wake of the mining boom. Every time I'd go back for Christmas, all anyone would talk about were housing prices. I think more so than anywhere else in the world Australia has this obsession with the home, or home ownership.

There's certainly something in that.
There really was this utopian idea after the Second World War when if you worked for a long time, anyone could get a home. I don't think that idealism still exists anymore, or is accessible for most people. And there's another layer at work—the suburban home is really an imported idea that's quite at odds with the Australian landscape. Because it's everywhere, it's been so normalised, but it's really in denial of the landscape.

Do you mean it's quite a white Australian ideal?
It's a white Australian idea, I guess—a European idea. I think painting the houses black was a way to cut them out of the landscape, to imagine they're not there.

Is that to suggest that's how things should be, or do you just want us to consider that possibility?
The work isn't taking a particular political stance. If I wanted to do that I'd probably write an essay. I'm making work with a poetic quality that asks those questions.

There's obviously been a long-running conversation about studio assistants, and how much of the actual painting, sculpting, or whatever it is they're doing for the artist. How do we acknowledge that sort of labour and still have this be an Ian Strange show?
In my studio, I work as a maker and a drawer, so if I want to make a completed work by myself, I can. But if I wanted to get out in the world, and do these large scale works, I need to work with big teams of people. It's hugely collaborative. In the real world, you have to react in real time, to save a shoot from bad weather, or whatever. In those scenarios, I'm closer to a director, co-ordinating these massive shoots. And I would never pretend I do all that by myself. It all comes down to what you need to execute. If I want to make a painting, I'll just go do that. But the artist outside of the studio is such an exciting prospect.

Your work is quite fixed on "the home" as an idea, but I don't get the sense you had a particularly unhappy childhood. Why the obsession? If that's a fair word to use.
(Laughing) It is. When I first started looking at houses it was just a way to look at my own origins—feeling quite stuck in suburbia as an adolescent. Then my work sort of looked at areas where people lost their homes: in America through the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the GFC, or in Christchurch, where 16,000 families were displaced by earthquakes. I did have a very typical suburban upbringing but, as an artist, I'm looking at the home as a universal symbols, to see what it means to people all over the world.

I think it's interesting that you've explored the idea of home all around the world, but you still feel like Australia's fixation on owning a home is unique.
Yeah, it's a particularly interesting one. We have such a national obsession with homeownership I think. There are people here who rent for life, and still, we're so obsessed with the housing market.

We do seem to always be trying to work out whose fault it is that dream is dead: was it boomers ruining it for millennials, or millennials ruining it for themselves by mismanaging money?
Yeah, exactly. We do.

Do people ever volunteer their houses?
Yeah, absolutely! I get a lot of offers. It was so hard to find them in the first place, in 2011 there were a lot of confused people on the other end of the phone when I tried to explain what I wanted to do. But it's not that way now. I would never do a private home, or an art collector's home. I only do it for projects. It's surreal it's come this far.

Shadow opens March 2nd @ Level 1, 13-15 Levy St Chippendale, Sydney NSW.