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Kai Wasikowski
Garden Etiquette
Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.
In this project I engaged with state archive collections related to the Royal National Park proclamation in Australia. Adjacent to this, I visited and made images at conservation sites in New South Wales (Aus), Rhode Island and Massachusetts (USA). The project combines photogravure, digital 3D softwares and analogue film processes as a means to de-familiarising myself with traditional photographic codes.
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Garden Etiquette #1
inkjet print
115 x 92 cm
2021
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Garden Etiquette #2 (Historic Customshouse)
inkjet print
100 x 80 cm
2021
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Garden Etiquette #3
inkjet print
30 x 24 cm
2021
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Here is seclusion (National Park)
inkjet print
64 x 52 cm
2022
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Remedies for unbelonging #2 (boy scouts in the National Park)
inkjet print
30 x 23 cm
2022
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Solid state
inkjet print
80 x 63 cm
2021
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Garden Etiquette #4 (Self portrait)
inkjet print
30 x 24 cm
2021
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Between a point and a plane (Observatory)
inkjet print
25 x 25cm
2023
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On sentimental grounds #1
inkjet print
25 x 28 cm
2022