In the image of the city documents the edges of the built environment, revealing what artists, architects and designers observe and experience at the borderlines of the city.

These thresholds are where things come together: literal edges where fringe suburbs meet productive land; internal edges, where islands of possibility erupt within the suburban blanket; and far-flung edges, where the vast resources that serve cities are marshalled. For the practitioners in this exhibition, these are sites where land, buildings and infrastructural elements are shaped to mobilise resources, organise human settlement and transform ecologies.

Far away from an image of urbanity and civic culture, these places often pass unnoticed. Here contemporary landscapes fray together – new suburbs and megastructures spill into the countryside, gaps are reclaimed in the fabric of streets and neighbourhoods, and the distinction between public realm and private enterprise becomes increasingly unstable.

Across photographic and moving-image works, the exhibition documents a series of architectural frontiers. The artists and makers take us from the edge lands of Melbourne’s outer suburbs, to the invisible line of a closed regional border, to the flourishing of new life in what were once urban voids. Multiplying peripheries and overlapping centres emerge, in which visions of monotony and surveillance exist alongside community, ancestry, refuge and sanctuary.

In the image of the city includes works by: 

Edith Amituanai
Safa, Emina and Fatima El Samad
Matthew Galloway
Monash Urban Lab with Baracco+Wright
These Are The Projects We Do Together 
Emily Parr and Arielle Walker
David Straight

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In the image of the city is curated by Kathy Waghorn and Kim Paton.

Kathy Waghorn is co-director of HOOPLA, a Tāmaki Makaurau based social enterprise developing place advocacy, and an Associate Professor in architecture at Monash University.

Kim Paton is the director of Objectspace. Her interest is in exhibition making and writing across the fields of craft, design, architecture and contemporary art.

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Research supported by the Department of Architecture in the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University.

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