Perth Voice Interactive

Watching a colleague hit the net for 45 minutes only to fail to score tickets to Springsteen’s February concert aptly demonstrated the power of the Boss’ music on young people.

The fact his boss—usually a middle-aged grump with little patience for time-wasting—gave the ticket-seeking endeavour his blessing (by allowing our colleague to miss a meeting) was a powerful reminder the Boss’ influence spans generations.

Taking its title from Springsteen’s 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town, an exhibition at the Perth Centre for Photography explores the way popular culture shapes Australia’s sprawling suburbia, its landscape, and the lives, of those living there.

Using video, music and photography it examines the in-between sites and borderlands of the built environment and landscape—or, as Springsteen says:

“Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost

“I’ll be waiting there on time and I’ll pay the cost

“For wanting things that can only be found

“In the darkness on the edge of town.”

Curator Kyle Weise used the title for a smaller exhibition in Melbourne a couple of years ago, exploring suburbia as a frontier of possibility, a route to freedom from everyday life, but one also tainted with doubt and fear.

“The title has such ambiguity, possibilities and trepidation,” he tells the Voice.

Although most images were taken in an Australian context, Natalia Jeffcott’s works are a graphic telling of decline tied to popular culture, with a series of photographs taken along America’s famed Route 66, Weise says.

The once “lively space” is now abandoned, “full of crumbling hotels”, victims of the interstate highways that litter the landscape.

Visual and sonic artist David Mutch draws the viewer up close and personal with his 22-centimetre images.

“From the distance they look non-descript. [People] have to go up to them and they get transported,” Weise says, adding the the images are “almost post-apocalyptic”.

The edge of town in James Voller’s work is quite literal, a vast cleared swathe of dirt criss-crossed with new roads and nothing else.

“It’s not quite a place people live yet, but is just about to be,” Weise says.

The idea for the exhibition came out of individual photographers’ work at other galleries, and led to a search for more.

“[Suddenly] they clicked…and this came together almost organically,” Weise says.

Darkness at the Edge of Town is on at PCP, 100 Aberdeen Street, Northbridge, until September 22.

by JENNY D’ANGER