Essay A

The idea for "home sweet gated home" occurred to me in 2002, when a new foreign policy shift began to emerge in the United States in the wake of September 11th. At a time when diplomatic, multilateral solutions seemed more important than ever, what surfaced instead was a new surge in national pride and an isolationist approach in our international relations that estranged rather than engaged other countries. The many parallels between this unsettling trend and that of the insular American gated community struck me right away as material for a long-term art project. The result is the installation on view.

Many suburban gated communities are created around a desire for greater security, in response to the rise in crime in the cities—whether exaggerated or actual. Whether or not the presence of perimeter walls, gates, personal security codes, identification cards, security officers, and surveillance cameras succeed in increasing safety, these measures reflect a preference to secede oneself from the social problems of urbanism, rather than to remain engaged in cities and maintain a direct incentive for arriving at workable solutions.

Some gated communities push the idea of secessionism even further by including schools, places of worship, and shopping malls within their compounds, beyond the basic provision of residences. And, in some extreme cases, some compounds vote to forfeit municipal services altogether in order to avoid paying the local taxes upon which the greater community depends.

Aside from these choices, gated communities usually adopt and market themselves along carefully crafted identities, in order to lure like-minded residents. For example, some communities present themselves as luxury golf retreats, while others, as family-friendly villages reminiscent of a folkloric, simpler way of life. However, while seemingly innocent on the surface, the pursuit of these identities can create, at the very least, a bland homogeneity, or at worst, all forms of social segregation within the gates.

Part of the challenge of living in a city is coexisting with neighbors who, chances are, are very different from ourselves. The commitment to making these relationships work is the very bedrock of the civic model upon which democracy depends, and for which it rewards with a vibrant cultural mix, a free flow of unexpected ideas, and security. By intensifying our exposure to other cultures, globalization is changing our way of life and demographics from the suburb to the city to the international arena. It is presenting a unique opportunity for greater cultural exchange from diplomatic circles right down to our neighborhoods. And yet in the face of this opportunity, our foreign policy grows more isolationist and hostile, and our communities, more gated from cultural integration.

"pride and prejudice" (2003-04) and "watch out for the eagle" (2003-05) allude to the spread of patriotic nationalism since 9/11, while both the screened mailbox in "processed mail" (2003-04) and "rules" (2003-04) dramatize the degree to which gated communities try to regulate information and behavior inside the gates. Overkill against a perceived threat is the subject of the installation "bring 'em on" (2005). "home gym" (2003) and "green oasis" (2003-04) address the needless duplication of resources and the isolation that arises in the pursuit of private pleasures, while "safe from you" (2003-04), "2-car garage" (2002-03), "the neighbor's pool" (2002-05), and "who is it?" (2005) underscore the paranoia and surveillance that exist in most gated communities. "r 'n r" (2003-04), "members only" (2002-03), "golf people" (2002-03), and "the racist next door" (2002-03), comment on how some gated communities, either intentionally or unintentionally, discriminate according to religion, class, or race through casual (or strategic) signifiers in the landscape or filters in their screening processes.

"immigration" (2004), "westernization" (2004), and "remember diplomacy?" (2004) directly address the counter-productive trends of our behavior within the international community. For example, the tendency for some US expatriates or overseas employees to confine themselves to American-styled gated communities as a means of avoiding assimilation is the subject of "westernization" (2004), which features one such compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As microcosms of the American way of life that are both symbolically and physically closed off to neighboring Arab residents, some of the gated communities in this area have backfired terribly by becoming targets of terrorist attacks.

"home sweet gated home" (2003-04), the namesake of this collective installation, is a way of saying that something is just not right with the current national impulse to secede from and alienate others who are different, especially in the face of so many new opportunities for cultural exchange and growth. Whether its critics like it or not, globalization and the social forces responsible for it in the first place are changing the cultural and political landscape everywhere, as well as the very meaning of what is "national" and "international." It is backward to deny that this is already happening, and reactionary to believe that building gates around communities and minds can prevent the definition of "American" from becoming more internationalized in the process.