Conservative Canberra painters and photographers are preoccupied with the city's monuments, its pretty parrots and mist-enhanced lakes.
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Their Canberra has, eerily, no suburbs at all.
But Canberra photographer Lee Grant believes that ''What's going on in [Canberra's] suburbia is really, really rich.''
Her forthcoming exhibition Belco Pride and looming book of the same name (''Belco'' is Belconneners affectionate nickname for Belconnen) celebrate that suburban richness. And because ''life goes on, everywhere'' she's finding the same richness, she told us yesterday, among the people and places of two other unfashionable fields seldom troubled by artists, Tuggeranong and Gungahlin.
But back to unsung, under-celebrated Belco and to Belco Pride. It all began, she explained yesterday, when in 2006 she was agonising over a focus, a theme for her photographic studies at the ANU's School of Art.
''Then one day I found it!'' She was driving to her sister's and drove past a wall in Spence across which she saw emblazoned the stirring sentiment ''BELCO PRIDE!''
''It was like a light bulb lighting up in my mind. It's the only epiphany I've ever had!''
She'd previously lived in Belconnen and then left Canberra altogether and then came back to Canberra and to Belconnen and found herself thinking about big questions of ''how belonging, connection and identity can emerge from a specific place''.
And so, for the exhibition and the book, we see images she harvested while making sustained (2006-10), sometimes detached and sometimes affectionate observations in that diverse, complex bailiwick, that kingdom of 25 northern suburbs known as Belconnen. Is she the first Canberra artist, at long last, as we approach our 100th birthday, ever to do anything as pioneering as this? Is she the first person ever to have, or to own up to having, an epiphany in Spence?
Belco Pride opens on September 28 at the Belconnen Arts Centre, 118 Emu Bank, Belconnen.