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...GALLERY EXHIBITS 2000 spacer spacer spacer ...A WINTER GARDEN
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Dan Arps: A Winter Garden
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Dan Arps: A Winter Garden
 
Fresh is a series which profiles the work of thirteen of New Zealand's most exciting current practitioners. All recent graduates from arts institutions, both local and international, these artists draw on a vast terrain of medium and criticality's, giving an overview of the diversity and depth of contemporary practice today.

 

Dan Arps
A Winter Garden

December 13 - 23, 2000

Part scavenger and part hobbyist constructor, Dan Arps creates sprawling installations which colonize space, crawling up walls, hanging off windows and ceilings, and spilling out doors. From meticulous cardboard and paper constructions to warehouse buckets and $2 shop detitrus, Arps gathers material seemingly randomly, yet each installation is painstakingly built up and layered.

Responding to his upbringing in Christchurch - 'the garden city', Dan Arps' installation merges historical and mythical representations of the garden with aspects of actual gardens the artist has encountered. Excavating sources that run the gamut from his own backyard to the Garden of Eden, Arps' project locates the garden as a point where nature is contained, removed from danger of predators, the darkness of unmapped terrain, and sheltered from the unpredictability of extreme weather patterns.

Named after a 1972 installation from Belgian proto-conceptualist Marcel Broodthayers, A Winter Garden questions the notions of nature and culture as distinct entities, using the garden as a meeting ground for the two, collapsing boundaries and making new and unlikely connections.


Reviews & Essays

Fresh - A series profiling Contemporary New Zealand Practitioners
Essay by Lee Devenish
in The Physics Room Annual 2001
ISBN 0-9582359-1-0