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Brit Bunkley & Andrea Gardner

Brit Bunkley and Andrea Gardner Garden Shed, 2018-19

Video and found shed, Dimensions variable. Video duration: 8:07 mins

Garden tools, gloves on a shelf, seeds, fertilizer, pots and sprays … these are some of the treasures of a garden shed, with its promise of contentment, creativity, beauty and communion with nature. In contrast, this garden shed contains a video presenting a 21st-century interpretation of gardens seen through the lens of 3D scanning. Situated in a corner of the video is a small swaying figure wearing a Tree Hat, suggesting a quiet reverence and longing for the natural world.

The video (which includes 3D animation and actual footage) focuses on gardens in Waiheke including the Sacred Blessing Sanctuary Garden, the Mudbrick Vineyard garden, the private garden of Graham and Jackie Guthrie and a commercial flower garden, Nourish Gardens, run by Christy Ralphs. The music “Like the Bitter Rind of a Cucumber” is by the Dunedin musician Alastair Galbraith. Garden Shed alludes to the increasing presence of virtual experiences in contemporary life and raises questions around perception, authenticity and our ongoing and changing relationship with nature.

Brit Bunkley

Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand-based artist whose art practice explores an oblique sense of paranoid apocalyptic fear tempered with a sense of whimsy and irony. His work has been in numerous international screenings including the White Box gallery in NYC, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, and the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. Other venues include The Federation Square Big Screen, Channels Festival 2017, Melbourne, Athens Digital Arts Festival 2017 and at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in Germany in 2018.

www.britbunkley.com

Andrea Gardner

Andrea Gardner was born in California, completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the University of Iowa. Working primarily in photography and mixed media sculpture, her practice explores how we perceive nature in a contemporary context, the tension between domesticity and nature, artifice and reality, and the familiar juxtaposed with the unexpected. She has work in the collections of The Dowse Art Museum, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the Sarjeant Gallery and the James Wallace Trust.

www.andreagardner.co.nz