Word: suburban
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...long does a foot take to stop hurting? Particularly in a time-stressed little girl from a high-power suburban school, drawn to the difficult world of classical dance? There are many reasons, both physical and mental, for this thing to hurt for a long time...
...toward the urban fringe where, as he put it, "Ninety-five percent of Australians actually live," Arkley was right on the money. And at the time of his death in 1999 aged 48, there were no limits to what he seemed capable of achieving. His color-saturated screens of suburban living rooms unfolded triumphantly around the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale; just opened was his first sell-out show in Los Angeles; and a new series of freeway paintings was in the works, suggesting infinite possible directions for his art. Then came Arkley's drug overdose in his Melbourne...
...Next he allows visitors to walk through the artist's 1991-92 collaboration with burlesque painter Juan Davila, to give an idea of his contemporaries. And in the final spaces, he provides the breadth of a suburban street for surveying Arkley's crowning canvases of the '90s, such as the almost radioactively-charged Family Home: Suburban Exterior, 1993, which made him justly famous. Along nearly 20m of nearby wall are hung the larger-than-life vignettes of suburban lounge rooms, many drawn from earlier works, which played like his Greatest Hits at Venice. Here, to walk before his Vulcan...
...surely approve. As his studio notebooks - and disco-colored De Stijl installation Muzak Mural-Chair Tableau, 1980-81 - attest, Arkley's vision couldn't be contained by the gallery wall. At various times he envisaged a home handyman show, inspired by the hardware stores near where he lived in suburban Oakleigh, and even started to design his own limited-edition furniture and crockery. Arkley was only half tongue-in-cheek, and what makes his work so likeable is the democracy of spirit that puts the tenets of high Modernism to such witty...
...work asks us to leave our final judgment open, which is what distinguishes him from that more cynical chronicler of the everyday, John Brack. Instead, we are left with a glimmer of mirth, irony perhaps, but not least of all affection for what takes place behind the masquerade of suburban life...