Wren Gardiner
[Image description: A photo of Wren, a white person with long, blonde and brown hair. They are wearing glasses and a black tank top, and look at the camera with a serious expression.]
Wren Gardiner (b. 1992, USA) is an artist based in Southern California. Wren's work is an amalgamation of performance art, writing, video art, and installation. In it, they recontextualize the confessional-style video characteristic of reality television through long-form video monologue performances installed in galleries or screened in theaters. Wren is interested in the language of the internet, the limits of this language, and the material effects of these limits on the physical body. How does one navigate having a living breathing body when so much time is spent in a space that is anti-body? How are social cues, once communicated via a physical body in material space, understood on the internet? What makes something cringe and why? What new phenomenology is experienced when we are split between the analog and the virtual? These are questions Wren is actively working through in their practice.
Wren has shown work across the United States and internationally. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Frieze San Diego, San Diego, CA (2022); Dramas de Otro Mundo, screened online through UV Estudios por Colección de Fortabat in Buenos Aires (2020); DOC LA Film Festival, screened at Raleigh Studios in Los Angeles, CA (2019); St. Louis International Film Festival, screened at the Plaza Frontenac Theater in St. Louis, MO (2019); and By Now We Are There, shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, AZ (2017). In 2022, they co-curated Frieze San Diego with Cat Gunn in San Diego, CA. Awards and recognition include the Flaherty Film Graduate Student Fellowship, awarded by the Flaherty Film Seminar (2021); the DOC LA Rising Star Award for their short film 52%, awarded by the Parajanov-Vartanov Institute (2019); and the Creative Achievement Award for their BFA thesis work, New American Ethos, awarded by the University of Arizona School of Fine Arts (2016). Wren holds a BFA in Photography, Video and Imaging from the University of Arizona (2016) and is currently a third year MFA candidate in Visual Arts at the University of California San Diego.
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