A New Project by Ian Strange and Trevor Powers: DALISON
ByJenevieve Kok‘Dalison 2’ by Ian Strange, 2022, digital archival photographic work, documentation of site-specific intervention. Image courtesy of Ian Strange and Trevor Powers.
DALISON is a creative collaboration between artist Ian Strange and musician Trevor Powers. The site-specific light and sound installation also culminated in a single-channel film, a series of photographic works, and a one-off live performance.
This work was created around an isolated home at 20 Dalison Avenue, Wattleup, a southern suburb of Perth in Western Australia. This space was designated for industrial redevelopment by the state government in 1996 and has been slowly erased. 20 Dalison is one of two remaining "hold out" homes in Wattleup's once-thriving township. After twenty years, the home's former owners finally decided to sell the place in 2019 and 2020. Dalison now awaits demolition, joining the fate of more than 300 homes that have been bought and raised by the government here over the past twenty years.
Created in collaboration with those former owners and other former Wattleup residents, the film and photographic works form a surviving record of this unique temporary installation. DALISON is a eulogy to this home and the community it was once part of. DALISON forms part of Strange's ongoing global body of work, which explores notions of home and social displacement around the world and will be shown in a series of upcoming exhibitions and screenings in 2022.
The making of DALISON. Image courtesy of Matsu Photography.
Strange's site-specific installation was designed and built in collaboration with a team of production, film, construction, and lighting specialists. It comprised a 260-square-metre video screen and film and theatre lighting, transforming the 20 Dalison Avenue home into a choreographed light and sound "performance" set to the melodic, experimental score by Trevor Powers.
The lighting design was based on Strange's original hand-drawn visuals. DALISON employs slow poetic light and sonic movements to intentionally subvert the regular usage of this cutting-edge screen technology common at music festivals. The result is a form of "anti-concert"; a performance transmitted out into the now empty expanse around the home where there is no audience.
The making of DALISON. Image courtesy of Matsu Photography.
The making of DALISON. Image courtesy of Matsu Photography.
'Dalison 3' by Ian Strange, 2022, digital archival photographic work, documentation of site-specific intervention. Image courtesy of Ian Strange and Trevor Powers.
The durational light and sound installation oscillate between isolating the home in darkness and lighting its context to reveal the vast empty suburb that surrounds it. Sometimes, the light removes the home from the site, rendering it into darkness. At other times, the home appears as a silhouette, situated back in its site, floating in space, shifting through monochromatic colours, and then finally disappearing back into darkness.
The original composition by Powers was informed by site-based research. He set out to create a work that sounds as if it was "dug up"; an audible relic of a past time discovered in some distant time, future, and past brought forth at once. Strange's light work is both an aesthetic interpretation of Powers' sound work and a collaborative and layered interpretation of the memory of this home as well as the many others for which it is an index.
DALISON by Ian Strange and Trevor Powers, 2022, single-channel film work. Image courtesy of Ian Strange and Trevor Powers.
DALISON by Ian Strange and Trevor Powers, 2022, single-channel film work. Image courtesy of Ian Strange and Trevor Powers.
The making of DALISON. Image courtesy of Matsu Photography.
Strange and his team documented this performance over a period of three nights, resulting in six new photographic works and an eighteen-minute film work set to Powers' score. On the last night of filming, a small group of community members, former residents, and collaborators were invited to an intimate one-off live viewing of the installation before it was dismantled. The story of the home's former owners, the Cukrov family, and that of Wattleup more broadly, as well as the making of the work, was captured in "Making Dalison", a documentary short accompanying the artworks.
The making of DALISON. Image courtesy of Duncan Wright.
Ian Strange. Image courtesy of Chris Gurney.
Trveor Powers. Image courtesy of Tyler T.Williams.
About the Artists
Ian Strange
Ian Strange is a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores architecture, space, and the home. His practice includes multifaceted collaborative community-based projects, architectural interventions and exhibitions resulting in photography, sculpture, installation, site-specific works, film, documentary works, and exhibitions created around the world. His studio practice includes painting and drawing, as well as ongoing research and archiving projects. Strange is best known for his ongoing series of suburban architectural interventions, film, and photographic works that subvert the archetypal domestic home.
Strange’s works have been exhibited extensively in spaces such as The National Gallery of Victoria, Canterbury Museum, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Whitewall Galleries, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, ThinkSpace, MCA, The Queensland State Library, Allouche Gallery, Standard Practice Gallery, Strychnin Gallery Berlin, and Fremantle Arts Centre; as well as at arts festivals including Underbelly, PUBLIC, NuArt, Auckland Festival of Photography, and SPRING/BREAK 2017. In 2017, ABC TV released "HOME: The Art of Ian Strange", a six-part documentary series looking at Strange’s career and work to date.
Strange has spoken and lectured widely about his practice, including at Parsons School of Design (2014), Columbia College Chicago (2017), TEDxSydney (2018), RMIT University (2019), and Harvard Graduate School of Design (2020).
Trevor Powers
Trevor Powers (born March 18, 1989) is an American musician, producer, and composer based in Idaho.
He began recording music in 2011, releasing a trilogy of albums under the moniker Youth Lagoon before announcing the end of the project in 2016. Two years later, Powers and a handful of contributors retreated to Sonic Ranch, a residential studio complex in Texas in the middle of a 2,300-acre orchard. The result was Mulberry Violence — the debut album under his birth name. The six-week tracking process consisted of fusing together textures, arrangements, and programming created at the ranch with poetry he had written over the previous two years. The album was mixed in Los Angeles by frequent Beyoncé collaborator Stuart White.
In 2020, after a severe panic attack, Powers took to a cabin with a piano near Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains. Here Powers made the album Capricorn. As Quinn Moreland notes on Pitchfork, "Like a heavily tattooed modern-day Thoreau, [Powers] sprinkles the record with recordings of raindrops, streams, and thunderstorms, reminders of the symphony that the natural world offers us for free." Capricorn paints a world of melancholia and unsettling beauty. Powers’ field recordings, classical motifs, and software sculptures don’t stop time; they examine it like a beetle under a microscope - exposing that the extraordinary is often hidden in plain sight. "From the minute we wake up, we’re in a trance," he says. "This is music for our digital coma."
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