This is the Rabbit Hole
This is the Rabbit Hole
Andrea Gardner
Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
38 Taupo Quay, Whanganui
19 February - 8 May 2022
Andrea Gardner, Child’s Pose, 2019
Staged with the curatorial support of the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, the Pattillo Project is a showcase exhibition awarded to the winner of the Pattillo Whanganui Arts Review each year.
Andrea Gardner is the third recipient of the Pattillo Project after glass artist Dr Kathryn Wightman in 2020 and sugar artist Tracy Byatt in 2021.
Gardner’s staged photographic work Now I Have Your Attention won the 2021 Pattillo Whanganui Arts Review Open Award and features in This is the Rabbit Hole, a colourful and vibrant exhibition of eighteen staged portraits and four sculptural works.
Andrea Gardner has experimented with different mediums and subject matter over the years. Her Pattillo Project exhibition shows her interest in the absurd, a deep love of colour and the playful act of spontaneously combining costumes, props and poses in the studio. The resultant photographic images are full of play and humour, colour and texture. Gardner says in ArtZone.co.nz: “I like to begin to improvise and play around with the props, to create scenarios that I have never seen before and that might surprise me. This exploration of the unexpected is interesting territory: intuitive, sometimes playful, enigmatic and often uncertain. Sometimes the best images are completely unplanned and come from spontaneously playing with the objects that I have at hand. I am not a trained photographer; my process is more akin to sculpture”
Gardner scours op shops for the right coloured clothes and interesting props. Her images are staged, posed and shot in her home studio, with Gardner only very rarely using photoshop to disguise a wire or a rogue strand of cotton.
In This is the Rabbit Hole, Gardner explores the psychological tension found in the female experience. Her works are theatrical and boldly coloured and composed; often featuring Gardner disguised in make-up, half hidden behind a wig, or a cardboard shield, enveloped in a costume, or inside a box.
“I have always enjoyed the work of the American photographer Cindy Sherman who continually uses herself in her photographs to portray various imagined characters. Haegue Yang is a Korean artist who creates multimedia installations consisting of wild sculptural objects often in front of large futuristic wall graphics. I think her work is weird and wonderful. Louise Bourgeois has also been an influence with her focus on the body, sexuality, domesticity, and memory” Andrea Gardner, ArtZone.co.nz
Andrea Garner was born and raised in northern California in an artistic household with lots of impetus to make and create. She came to live in Whanganui in 1995 with her partner the artist Brit Bunkley. For many years she was an art educator.
See Andrea Gardner’s 2020 PhotoForum Featured Portfolio here.
We need your help to continue providing a year-round programme of online reviews, interviews, portfolios, videos and listings that is free for everyone to access. We’d also like to dream bigger with the services we offer to photographers and the visual arts.
We’ve partnered with Press Patron to give readers the opportunity to support PhotoForum Online.
Every donation helps.