Property Line #2, Ranco Cucamonga, California 1984

Editor: Here we have Joe Deal’s “Property Line #2, Rancho Cucamonga, California,” taken in 1984. It’s a photograph, a black and white image capturing what seems like a typical suburban scene. I'm struck by how…unremarkable it feels. The composition seems so deliberately plain. What do you see in this piece? Curator: Unremarkable, you say? That’s the hook, isn’t it? Deal wasn’t interested in postcard prettiness. He was after something far more unsettling – the poetry of the ordinary, if that makes sense. Think of it as visual anthropology. Suburbia, yes, but also about land use, boundaries – literal and figurative – and a sort of quiet, almost haunting, observation. The starkness, the lack of drama… it all points to something. Almost a feeling of prefabrication. What feelings arise when looking at it, for you? Editor: It definitely feels sterile. Clinical, even. I notice all these geometric shapes and straight lines, it's like, too perfect and precise, the way everything’s arranged and framed… It almost feels lifeless despite being of living spaces. Curator: Exactly! It’s that tension, that push-pull between order and…well, what’s the opposite of order here? A blooming weed? A misplaced garden hose? Deal is subtly hinting at nature's resistance to our need to control. A feeling of disconnect pervades, doesn’t it? Almost… apocalyptic, viewed through a domestic lens. Do you think it suggests something about the American Dream? Editor: I do now! I initially just saw it as a photo of a neighborhood. It makes me think of manufactured feelings; fake, imposed senses of "the good life" for all Americans. The photo leaves so many interpretations open and hidden that invite deeper thoughts and conversations, even arguments! Curator: Precisely. He hands us this image and almost seems to asks, “Okay, what do you think *this* all means?” It's more profound and quietly unsettling than a landscape of the sublime.