There’s a silence in the suburbs that doesn’t come from the absence of sound, it comes from the absence of need. Everything has already been decided. The lawn is trimmed. The fence is painted. The mailbox waits obediently. And we, viewers or perhaps past inhabitants, drift through this setting like ghosts of a memory not entirely ours.

In The Suburbs, Hayden constructs a world where the illusion of perfection becomes the stage for subtle unravelings. This is not satire. Nor is it nostalgia. It is a meditation, a dream where the rules of logic are gently bent, and where every inch of grass holds a question.

We begin with Clear Boundaries III.

Two endless rows of mirrored fences stretch to infinity, reflecting back only the sky and the manicured green between them. There’s no door, no figure, no sign of use, only repetition. In this calculated symmetry, beauty morphs into sterility. It’s the visual equivalent of a gated thought. Hayden calls it “strangely perfect.” He speaks of the suburb as a space where nature exists only under regulation: trimmed, boxed, ornamental.

This curated nature is present in Clear Boundaries II as well, where a delicate fence cuts into a sloping lawn beneath an impossibly soft sky.

There’s something almost innocent in the image, until you realize that this fence protects nothing. There’s no house. No threat. Just division for the sake of it. It’s the architecture of psychological boundaries: elegant, unnecessary, and somehow deeply familiar.

Then the terrain begins to fracture.

In Tree-lined Street, the sidewalk gives way to something unspeakable. The ground drops open and pixelated columns fall into a dark, galactic void. It’s not decay, it’s revelation. Beneath the apparent safety of suburban order lies something unformed, perhaps infinite. And here Hayden’s surrealism shows its real force: not in inventing fantasy, but in suggesting that fantasy was always already present, just below the surface.

The emotional pull intensifies with Mourning Walk, a scene that captures suburban ritual, the morning stroll, the exercise routine, the walk to school, but subverts it.

The sidewalk here descends into a narrow trench, carved like a wound into the lawn. The shadows stretch long, the path feels claustrophobic. It is grief disguised as routine. An ordinary curve turned funerary. The title isn’t metaphor, it’s confession.

In Clear Boundaries, Hayden returns to the motif of the mirrored fence.

A soft pink house sits behind reflective panels that seem to erase it from view. What we see is not the home, but its camouflage. The fence doesn’t protect, it isolates. It blurs identity. The American dream pixelated into anonymity. Hayden tells me he often imagines he’s “walking through these worlds with a camera.” If so, this is the moment he finds himself staring into the lens, and sees nothing looking back.

But then comes My Neighbor the Gardener.

It floats, both literally and emotionally. A house made entirely of wildflowers, perched on an island in a mirror-still lake, far from everything and everyone. It is too beautiful, too quiet. There’s no way back. The path leads inward, not outward. The neighbor, the gardener, are they there? Or is this house the memory of them, wrapped in the garden they left behind? Utopia and exile converge. In Hayden’s words: “It’s a world that’s surreal, but believable. Like a dream you accept without question.”

Hayden’s The Suburbs does not indict the suburban condition, nor does it romanticize it. Instead, it slows it down. It isolates each structure, fence, lawn, sidewalk, and listens to what it has to say when no one is speaking. “Too much clarity can flatten an artwork,” he tells me. “I want people to feel something, maybe even something primal.”

And indeed, it’s not about understanding The Suburbs. It’s about feeling it creep under your skin. Remembering that you too once heard the hum of sprinklers at 6 a.m., watched the sun hit the vinyl siding just so, wondered what lay behind the neighbor’s curtain. In Hayden’s universe, these moments become sacred, strange, and quietly eternal.

Because The Suburbs isn’t just a place, it’s a condition. A landscape of longing dressed up as normalcy. A mirror with a front lawn.