Tag: outpost festival

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Kid Zoom returns to thoughts of needing to escape

A screenshot from "Home"

Ian Strange aka Kid Zoom‘s installation, Home, at last year’s Outpost Festival in Sydney was, from what I heard, the highlight of the festival. We covered Home last year, but now the video aspect of that installation is available online. It boils down to 5 minutes of explosions and destruction of property, which is always fun to watch. Strange explains the installation as “a work reflecting on my origins in the Australian suburbs I felt that I needed to escape when I was younger,” so I’m thinking of the video as a high-definition expression of teen angst and the dream of running completely wild in the boring suburbs. Anyone have other thoughts? Here’s the video:

‘HOME’ an exhibition by Ian ‘Kid Zoom’ Strange from KID ZOOM [Ian Strange] on Vimeo.

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Kid Zoom at Outpost/Cockatoo Island

Outpost is a massive street art festival on now at Cockatoo Island in Sydney, Australia. For better or worse, it’s sponsored by the Australian government and from what I’ve seen they are showing a fairly bubblegum pop version of street art so the scope of the show is quite limited, but there are some great artists involved and the festival had over 12,000 visitors in its first week. Kid Zoom‘s stunning installation might be an exception to that bubblegum vision, although it’s certainly more conceptual and institutionally traditional than a lot of street art. He recreated his childhood home from memory and life sized, painted it with a skull and then wrecked and blew up three cars next to the house (which is documented in a film at the festival). Not sure what the cars are about, but the idea of wrecking the cars that the Australian Government probably paid for seems like, at the very least, a good excuse to do something crazy and fun. Here are some photos from the installation and video stills. Outpost has free entry and runs through December 11th.

Photos courtesy of Kid Zoom