The Digital Screens Initiative presents work by two photographers, Bobbie Gray (NZ) + Nat Van Halle (Ned/NZ).
Bobbie Gray - Digital Garden
Bobbie Gray is an Auckland-based artist whose work explores the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, along with an ongoing investigation surrounding the nature of perception. Digital Garden aims to create a new botanical universe, a place between dreams and reality. The work encompasses contradictions of the real and unreal, attraction and repulsion. By placing viewers in the heart of a reinvented nature, the work attempts to create a symbiosis between art, nature and us.
Scavenged organic materials are utilised together with shifts in scale and lighting to create believable yet entirely artificial environments. Moving image is used as a tool to explore how context and framing shape the meaning and experience of an artwork. By filming these scenarios in real time, the intention is to give the work a moment of ambiguity, that deals with the idea of image culture, and the replacing of direct experience with simulacra.
The movement of each element in and out of the overall sequence suggests that what we see is only part of the work, the rest must be mentally reconstructed and in this way we project our vision beyond the “frame” of the artwork. In opposition to the unrelenting pace of digital existence, this new botanical universe unfolds in a slow mesmerising fashion, intended to create an environment of meditative contemplation. By using technology to modify the perception of reality, the work subverts the truth-telling qualities of real world recording, encouraging viewers to spend time with these traces of material and action.
Nat Van Halle - Nature
Nat’s work captures the beauty above and below our wild oceans. She uses her camera to explore the abstract beauty of the planet’s seas, highlighting its textures and illuminating still moments of an otherwise turbulent force of nature.
See bio - Nat Van Halle
Bio - Bobbie Gray; Artist Bio
