The suburban yard is an outdoor enclosure, framed by fences, walls, and hedges that define a personal yet publicly visible space. Within these areas between dwellings, individuals and families express themselves by shaping and decorating small portions of landscape. The yard is a meeting point of the natural and the artificial — an open-air home where soil, plants, and animals are alternately suppressed, cultivated, and domesticated. It is a privatized parcel of land designed to serve multiple roles: outdoor living room, workspace, and playground. 

This exhibition brought an urban perspective to what is typically a suburban space. The commissioned works interpreted the plant, animal, and human life of the lawn — and the accessories that animate it — through memory and lived experience, media imagery, marketing of an American ideal, and the complex interplay of desire and unease. 

Presented in the context of Socrates Sculpture Park, New City is mural-scale wallpaper of an original painting featuring a panoramic image of a suburban housing development under construction. These installations transposed a suburban vernacular into a metropolitan, industrial setting. Socrates itself is a remarkable platform: once a rubble-strewn lot, it was transformed into a natural oasis. Yet it is an entirely constructed environment, formed where no land previously existed. Against this backdrop, the exhibition reimagined the Park as a collective suburban backyard, a shared space that stages the American dream of privatized nature in displacement.