Brit Bunkley
All the work in the studio tour video has a digital origin (except of course the dust devil. Albeit the original video has a number of digital clips).
I am intrigued by the intersection of virtual and physical sculpture and the juncture of animation and captured video. The content of the artwork explores an oblique sense of paranoid apocalyptic fear tempered with a sense of whimsy and irony. The content is conditioned by a deep interest in politics, the environment and history.
The computer has been a natural vehicle for creating my artwork, not only as a tool for the design and dimensioning of sculpture but as a means towards creating virtual sculpture, photography and digital video. It is my intention that the computer output function by creating and manipulating virtual and actual photorealistic images, video and objects that are convincing and unsettling.
Recent sculptural work includes the use of gold leaf on 3D print tableaus of 3D scanned ruined landscape and shrapnel and bullet-pocked walls from war zones. Additionally, I have been collaborating with Andrea Gardner making sculpture that includes assembled 3D prints from 3D scans of animals in unusual contexts.
Artist Bio
Brit Bunkley is a New Zealand-based artist and videographer whose practice includes the construction of large-scale outdoor sculpture and installations as well as the creation of ‘impossible’ moving and still images and architecture designed using 3D modeling, video editing, and image editing programs. In Bunkely’s words, his work ‘explores ‘an oblique sense of paranoid apocalyptic fear tempered with a sense of whimsy and irony.
Bunkley, an NZ/USA citizen, has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship in the USA. In 2012 Bunkley was an award winner at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art for the «Now&After» Festival. He shows extensively internationally. He was awarded second prize for the Sustainability Short Film Competition at The Weatherspoon Art Museum in Gainsborough NC, the USA in 2019.
International screenings include the White Box gallery in NYC and the Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin. He took part in the Athens Digital Arts Festival and File Sao Paolo 2017, 2018, and 2019 and Kasseler Dokfest also in 2019. Bunkley screened his video, Ghost Shelter/6 at The Federation Square Big Screen, Channels Festival 2017, Melbourne, and at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany in 2018, Docfest Kassel 2019 and Jihlava IDFF 2021, Czech Republic. Recent group exhibitions include the “Stories of Rust”, Tauranga Art Gallery, Tauranga, NZ, and “Green Around” at Taipei, Taiwan, “Sculpture on the Gulf 2019”, Auckland , NZ, the 2021 National Contemporary Art Award, Waikato Museum, Waikato, NZ and at the Auckland Botanic Gardens 2021.
Recent solo exhibitions include Ghost Shelter 17 at Te Uru (windows), Titirangi, Auckland, NZ and The Happy Place at Sanderson Contemporary Art, Auckland…also at the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, New Zealand in 2018 and the Institut für Alles Mögliche/Stützpunkt Teufelsberg, Berlin 2019.