“It’s not really the country and it’s not the town. It never suited us”
E.M Forster, Howard’s End

Antenna Space is pleased to present Cul-De-Sac, a group exhibition on view from 22 July through 8 September, 2017. Organized by Franklin Melendez.

They say summers are hottest in the city, but it’s in its outermost reaches where they simmer most strangely. Here, in this sprawling in-between, the heat lingers and seeps into endless expanses of dull concrete, into quaint communities of duplicate houses that sift and divide the landscape into tidy, manicured rows. Lanes, roads and cul-de-sacs christened after late-blooming flowers and household spices are punctuated by neat lawns, hard-working sprinklers, colorful swing sets and other such props that only find their meaning in domestic micro-dramas. At night, the spell dissipates but one can still feel it radiating from the empty parking lots of school yards, strip malls and 7-Eleven’s; it lends a hypnotic quality to the sounds of rolling skateboards and the humming of streetlamps…across the way someone’s playing weird remixes of 1979 – which, come to think of it, is the best Smashing Pumpkins song not because it’s their most poignant, but because it unearths this strange fantasy of suburban listlessness and teenage angst that one can’t help but daydream of even as we float further away from its sticky-sweet grip.

The artists included in the exhibition share a common interest in aspects of this quotidian landscape. They repurpose its visual codes and material remnants, explore its flattened spatial relations while memorializing its anxious inhabitants. Indirectly, they also tease out its founding myths and origins, while tracing the ways in which the now universal ‘suburban’ idiom mutates and evolves as it is transplanted onto fresh terrains and territories. Cross-pollinated by unexpected histories and the local flora, it takes root and blooms into forms both strange and new.