Title: The Promise of Real Estate

Photographer/s: Carl Gunhouse
Christine Rogers
Rachel Boillot
Tiana Peterson

Contributor/s: Chris McGee
Lauren Portada
Tom Marquet

Date of publication: 2010

Place of publication: Brooklyn, NY

Dimensions: 6 3/4″x 6 3/4″

Number of pages: 34

Number of pictures: 26

Printer: Blurb

Publisher: Runhouse Productions

Designer: Carl Gunhouse & Christine Rogers

Editor: Carl Gunhouse & Christine Rogers

Language: English

Category: exhibition catalogue

Price: $15

Summary: One of the first things you learn to draw is a house in a landscape of sun, horizon and stick figures. Becoming an adult means finding a stable relationship, a career, a car, and perhaps most importantly, you start looking at real estate in the hopes that sooner or later you might be able to establish the lasting security of a home. You long for a sense of place where you can be happy and fulfilled. Yet this promise of real estate has led to the complete destabilizing of the world’s most powerful economy.

Each unique in their approach, Carl Gunhouse, Chris McGee, Christine Rogers, Rachel Boillot, Lauren Portada and Tom Marquet all deal with the idea of real estate. Their artworks examine the topic of home ownership in a variety of ways: the seduction of the home, the illusion of stability that home ownership provides, and what happens when the illusion collapses.
Carl Gunhouse’s photographs of housing developments are made as real estate agents lead potential buyers around overgrown lots next to model homes. Agents, who continue to encourage buyers to take the always uncertain leap of faith that the development will be completed and sold and that the houses will increase in value.

The paintings of culled internet images by Chris McGee give a visual form to the desire that drives the suburban dream, the ownership of a two story house with a garage and a large yard. A desire that is shown in a fever dream of picturesque lawns seen in wide swathes of green and yellow while a threatening red undercoat peeks around the edges, a constant reminder of the illusion at hand.
Christine Rogers directly addresses the promise that a home offers, the hopes that, once purchased, it will provide a lasting sense of security, a backbone of personal and familiar happiness. Her photograph and video lovingly depict the depths of disappointment when the ideal home fails to live up to its owner’s dreams, and the human necessity to continue on, and build a new life.

The most detached view of real estate is comes from Rachel Boillot’s sad but tranquil interior photographs of foreclosed houses. Buildings that have become emptied-out husks were once filled with the promise of being a home. Now empty, they embody a failed investment, a drain on a bank’s ledger, but most of all a reminder of the tragic belief in the ever-increasing value of property.

Lauren Portada’s paintings depict a space of psychological wilderness. Her dark refracted landscapes each with a sliver of light and color depict the dreams and nightmares familiar to new home buyers. The fear that a future owner’s dream development will never be completed, leaving the inhabitants in a barely livable wasteland of unfinished roads and overgrown lots.

The tragicomedy of Tom Marquet’s sculptures and drawings critique the materials of the home and the signs of “development”: a solid two-by-four that is really only a hollowed-out illusion of stability, a sign that promises (or threatens) coming stores, or a drawing of a defunct bank made by the free pens that are all that remain of its existence. All act as an ironic endpoint to the pathos of our second gilded age.

Book link: http://www.carlgunhousephoto.com/stuff-for-sale/

Donated by: Carl Gunhouse

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