The Peaceable Kingdom (Excerpt)

“The Peaceable Kingdom” is a dreamscape of various domestic and wild animals inhabiting human architectural spaces. The title is taken from a series of paintings by the Quaker minister and painter, Edward Hicks. He painted 62 versions of the Peaceable Kingdom of peaceful coexistence between predators and prey (“an eschatological state inferred from texts such as the Book of Isaiah, the Book of Hosea, and the Sermon on the Mount”). 

Absent of humans, the video would depict animals interacting naturally within human settings. Convincingly real but at the same time clearly digital, they encompass a type of animal deepfake ontology. (The use of actual animals would be prohibitively expensive. And they would probably eat each other before the first take.) By observing animals behaving naturally within out-of-context Auckland environments, we can rediscover inconspicuous sites as well as familiar locations with a new perspective. These animals are in a sense, totems - spiritual kin. 

I have taken cues from David Lynch’s hauntingly surreal interiors and animal shorts (“Rabbits”, “What Did Jack Do?”) which appear to poke holes into a parallel universe while inhabiting oblique dreams. Ildikó Enyedi’s magical film “On Body and Soul” is another touchstone. It is revealed in this film that the two work colleagues of an abattoir unfamiliar with each other, a manager and a new inspector unknowingly share a recurring dream of two deer, male and female in the forest. They, of course, fall in love.