Image

A black and white photogrammetry scan of the side of a building made of large granite slabs.

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.

Image

black and white photograph taken at night using flash. A trail camera is pictured in the middle of the frame, strapped to the trunk of a tree. Dark bushed and trees are just visible in the background.

Garden Etiquette #1

inkjet print
115 x 92 cm
2021

Image

A black and white photogrammetry scan of the side of a building made of large granite slabs.

Garden Etiquette #2 (Historic Customshouse)

inkjet print
100 x 80 cm
2021

Image

a black and white photograph of two long planks of driftwood in the shape of a cross, washed up on the rocky shores of a bay.

Garden Etiquette #3

inkjet print
30 x 24 cm
2021

Image

A black and white photograph of a reflective orb, floating in mid air, at night, amongst bushy trees and a water creek underneath.

Here is seclusion (National Park)

inkjet print
64 x 52 cm
2022

Image

A black and white photo of three light skinned adolescent boys gathered around the side of a tent trying to repair it, it is raining and muddy in the middle of the night.

Remedies for unbelonging #2 (boy scouts in the National Park)

inkjet print
30 x 23 cm
2022

Image

A black and white photo of a granite rock encased in a silicon hard drive cover, positioned against a similar looking granite rock.

Solid state

inkjet print
80 x 63 cm
2021

Image

A black and white photograph of the chest, neck and jaw of a light-skinned man drinking from the hose of a hydration flask.

Garden Etiquette #4 (Self portrait)

inkjet print
30 x 24 cm
2021

Image

A black and white photograph inside an old looking observatory picturing a wooden ship wheel with ropes attached around it that extend up towards the ceiling.

Between a point and a plane (Observatory)

inkjet print
25 x 25cm
2023

Image

A black and white photograph of the woods in winter, with the evening sun just lighting up the sides of bar trees and the leafy foliage covering the ground.

On sentimental grounds #1

inkjet print
25 x 28 cm
2022

 

RISD Grad ShowRISD Grad Show

Attach a Drupal Library