Flashback Monday: It's Hip to Be Square

Like fancypants "new towns," cutting-edge art is supposed to confound our expectations by presenting the mundane in ways that challenge us as viewers. And if there's one thing we know about Reston, it's that it's way too progressive to be constrained by the usual expectations of society. No, even our art has to "push boundaries," if not by breaking through the fourth wall, then by challenging our conception of what the very canvas should look like.

Enjoy "Untitled" or perhaps "We Don't Know The Title," this fancy piece of Reston-themed art we found on the Googles. Just don't get too close to one of the edges of the frame -- it might poke your eye out!

Beyond--or perhaps because of--the genre-busting presentation, however, it's somehow comforting to see a very familiar Reston as the subject of this "artwork": a home with excessive balcony exposures painted in nondescript earth tones obscured by dangerous trees. Which, for serious students of art history and semioticians like us, brings to mind a question: When someone decides to do the first serious artistic rendition of the Field of Parallelograms, will they deliberately put it in a correctly oriented frame?