Anyone who has ever lived in suburbia knows the mold: two-car garage, two-story house that looks exactly like the one next door, seven-foot fence, anonymous families and silent faces.
UNM graduate student Chad Person knows this pattern all too well and has chosen his latest show "A Model Community" to portray his own experience in a gated community.
"The word 'gated community' is really an oxymoron," Person said. "There's nothing even resembling community within the confines of these walls."
Person said he was inspired for this piece when he moved to his gated community in August, not entirely by choice. A few years ago he read an essay by William Upski Wimsatt titled "No More Prisons," that had a strong connection to his suburb.
In the essay, Wimsatt compares gated communities to the conditions of fear that white middle-class suburbia represented. A place of infinite supposed security where people can lock their doors, lock their gates and lock the fence outside the gate, Person said.
Person remembers growing up in a small Midwestern town where the neighbors had keys to his house, and his family rarely ever locked their doors.
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"It disturbs me," Person said. "I don't know anyone here. I've made really aggressive attempts to meet people. They are really cold to any sort of attempt, though."
Person's diverse body of work includes a Web site questioning pornography, prints of left-over breakfast foods and Internet mapping among many other things.
"I'm the kind of artist who just likes to share their world view," Person said. "There's no real logic for how I move from one thing to the next. These bodies of work are little spurs of my personality."
In Person's show, he created a model of his gated community and wrote a script, for which he recorded voices, to demonstrate the disconnectedness among the people in his suburb.
"The way we've become so isolated, it must be something to do with the number of walls and barriers in this place," Person said. "It's become a visual representation of the communication barriers and this alienation we feel between people."
In the model, as well as the community, Person notes there are three times as many walls as houses.
"I'm hoping that people who see this particular piece might leave with questions or with doubt, with a seed," he said. "Something that can foster an opinion about what gated communities are bringing into society."
Person said the show's main purpose is to stimulate dialogue. On Friday, March 12, a week after the show's opening, a special panel will take place consisting of Person and representatives from the architecture, psychology and art history departments.
"The main goal is not if someone likes my artwork they might buy it, or to make something for someone to look at," Person said.
There isn't a piece for sale at Person's show.
"What's my show about? It's about place. It's about why I don't know my neighbors. It's about being separated from the rest of the city. It's about walls," Person said.
What: "A Model Community"
When: Opening Saturday
5-9 p.m.
Where: The Walls
510 Central Ave.
Price: Free
