From Carrie Miller…
Heath Franco’s Dream Home is one of the most anticipated solo shows of the year. His last major video work, Your Door, hit the contemporary art world like a blast of hot air after a day in a Muzak-piped, air-conditioned shopping centre.
Franco’s brutal psychological portrait of everyday life in that tour de force – which maniacally exploited the most repugnant of marketing techniques, the advertising jingle, to prove that the Devil really is in the detail – was populated by a cast of bizarre yet strangely recognisable characters. The artist performed with a Brando-like bravura and a Dadaist sense of the absurd. In this latest dual-channel video, Dream Home, Franco’s characters, afflicted with tics and repeating inanities, inhabit a fictitious landscape that features a hand-built model house the artist found at a local Vinnies.
This new site of ‘suburban terror’ is echoed in the gallery space itself. In an act that suggests a contestant on a reality TV series about home renovations has lost their mind, Franco has remodelled the gallery interior in the manner of the found model house.
There goes the neighbourhood.
Until July 17
Galerie pompom, Chippendale
Pic: Courtesy the Artist & Galerie pompom
