The purpose of Garden Reflexxx is to liberate films of their staunch structures. This ongoing practice, aimed at the concept of ‘art film’ filmmaking, raises questions around definitive narratives of ‘looking good’, and how that relates to unaffordable production methods. Is film ‘making’ dictated by evasive power structures, ideas that tell you right or wrong, instead of true and fake? Can images free themselves of the price tag? Do films have pretty privilege? Is it possible to correct this?
Garden Reflexxx is the creative partnership of film-obsessives Jen Atherton and André Shannon working predominantly with trans/queer artists. Operating as an intermedia group their productions are informed by community art practice and industry-critical theory in a search for natural bridges between independence, interdepedence and arthouse production.
Garden Reflexxx’s singular open-filmmaker artistry upends mono-director banality, meditating on group play and experimental making. Their works cut resourcefully between improvisation, videographic imagination, spiritual logic, impulse, and the mistakes-curious family movie. Permitting a form of neo-intimate portrait film. In their world words outrace ideas, crashing at the finish line - talk explosions as a penultimate monument. Collapsing through industry burnout or excessive artmaking lands an oeuvre of films, installations, criticism, radio, and iPhone poetry. A practice of interminably ongoing rushes-party bedroom productions where Time and Patience are one candle burning at both ends. The result? An inexhaustible enthusiasm for everything-film that finds humanism out of order and representation immediate: random-family orientated and realistic. By journeying through, their films create a seduction of spectacle. The chaos of relationships. Metropolitan situations without role models. Super-natural gay films.
Garden Reflexxx is the creative partnership of film-obsessives Jen Atherton and André Shannon working predominantly with trans/queer artists. Operating as an intermedia group their productions are informed by community art practice and industry-critical theory in a search for natural bridges between independence, interdepedence and arthouse production.
Garden Reflexxx’s singular open-filmmaker artistry upends mono-director banality, meditating on group play and experimental making. Their works cut resourcefully between improvisation, videographic imagination, spiritual logic, impulse, and the mistakes-curious family movie. Permitting a form of neo-intimate portrait film. In their world words outrace ideas, crashing at the finish line - talk explosions as a penultimate monument. Collapsing through industry burnout or excessive artmaking lands an oeuvre of films, installations, criticism, radio, and iPhone poetry. A practice of interminably ongoing rushes-party bedroom productions where Time and Patience are one candle burning at both ends. The result? An inexhaustible enthusiasm for everything-film that finds humanism out of order and representation immediate: random-family orientated and realistic. By journeying through, their films create a seduction of spectacle. The chaos of relationships. Metropolitan situations without role models. Super-natural gay films.
Exhibitions, collaborations,
writing and festival selections include:
Spectacle Cinema
Casula Powerhouse
pornfilmfestival Berlin
AGNSW
Firstdraft
Sydney Festival
Dead End Film Festival
Flowers123
Miscellania
sideway
MCA
Seventh Gallery
Verge Gallery
Powerhouse Museum
Slamdance Film Festival
The Lincoln Centre
Performance Space: Day For Night
Vancouver Art Gallery
Soft Centre
Cement Fondu
Soft Stir