Double House Blues 2006

Summary

Melbourne-based artist Stephen Haley has a steadfast interest in suburbia and the urban landscapes that, historically and globally, people have come to occupy in ever-increasing numbers. He investigates urban existence chiefly through painting, new media and installation, often using 3D modelling in his process, translating the outputs into oil and acrylic paintings and lightjet photographs. This working practice intentionally introduces a slippage of sorts between the virtual and the real, between the projected and the representational, creating optical and experiential effects in our understanding of the worlds conveyed; the practice also mimics the staged processes through which we conceptualise, project and construct built spaces. A touchstone for Haley’s urban landscapes is the notion of the mesh, which, he has commented, has come to replace the 20th-century idea of the grid as an organising concept – one that has been as crucial to mapping as it has been to modernism. Unlike the grid, with its flat, two-dimensional presence, the mesh enables the third dimension of depth and also provides for movement, flow and dynamism. Take Haley’s ‘Double House Blues’, which came into the collection in 2006. The network of intersecting lines and brilliant blue-toned planes creates a series of vanishing points and emerging spaces. From the geometry that crackles across and dissects the pictorial space, a pair of Monopoly-style blue houses pops out, and so, too, connected buildings that resemble something akin to the orchestrated spaces of our suburbs and communities.