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Jen +61 452 236 419 // @drasticbitch
Andj +61 435 611 298 // @andreshannon.fr

gardenreflexxx@gmail.com


SELECTED WORKS


Feature Films

  • 2024: Mood Ring – Cinematographers/Editors/Co-producers (Dir. Sereima Adimate). Screened at Sydney Festival, Golden Age Cinema, and Casula Powerhouse (Mood Ring 360° solo exhibition).
  • 2023: Grape Steak – Writer/Director/Editor. Screened at Miscellania, ACMI, Pink Flamingo Cinema, and Spectacle Theatre NYC.
  • 2020: Immortal Memories – Cinematographers/Editors. Hybrid documentary funded by Sydney Mardi Gras and The Gender Centre, premiered online.

Short Films & Video Art

  • 2024: Exquisite Corpse (Salote Tawale) – Editors/Cinematographers. Featured at PHOTO2024 (Footscray Arts Centre).
  • 2024: Biraddali Dancing on the Horizon (Bhenji Ra) – Editors. Featured at Auto Italia (London).
  • 2023: BIOSPHERE (Sarah Rodigari) – Editors. Exhibited at The Art Gallery of Western Australia (Rural Utopias).
  • 2022: Ang Idol Ko (Club Ate) – Cinematographers/Co-producers/Editors. Premiered at The Ultra Unreal (MCA).
  • 2021: Mood Ring Vol.1 – Directors/Cinematographers. Funded by ACF and Cement Fondu.

Curation

  • 2023: SWARM Film Festival – A large-scale trans-artist-specific event for Sydney World Pride, featuring works by Vaginal Davis, Ahya Simone, and TELFAR TV.
  • 2023: Overshare Video Festival – Melbourne Fringe Festival. Included screenings, talks, and workshops with filmmakers like Meriem Bennani and Priya Leigh.

Film Festivals/Exhibitions

  • Slamdance Film Festival
  • Sydney Festival
  • Berlinpornfilmfestival
  • Vancouver Art Gallery (The Great Recycle)
  • Sydney Writer’s Festival (Screwball at Verge Gallery)
  • Dead End Film Festival (Angel and Hailstorm)
  • Firstdraft Gallery (Dust by Blake Lawrence)
  • Blacktown Drive-In (SWARM).

Published Work

  • 2022: Soft Stir Magazine – Co-authored “Welcome to Gay Beach Town.”
  • 2021: Sissy Screens – Written interviews with Leilah Weinraub and Miranda July.
  • 2020: Berlin Critics Week – Feature article “Get Outta My Way” by André Shannon.
EDUCATION & RESIDENCIES
  • 2022: Park and Pool Midwest Critics and Moviemakers Residency supported by Fitch Trecartin Studio, Athens, Ohio
  • 2018: Bachelor of Arts (Screen Studies), Australian Film, Television, and Radio School.





ABOUT GARDEN REFLEXXX

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, impressionsm, videographic imagination, spiritual logic, impulse, looking for reception, looking for something 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.





André and Jen met at AFTRS in 2015 where Andj made Vengeance and Jen made Night on Floating Island, Vengeance went on to win the Montreal World Film Festival for Best Experimental Film (Student) and Night on Floating Island was accepted into Slamdance Film Festival. Their first... excuse the third person bio... their first true collaboration was Caledonian Road which has since become a soft post-porn staple of the internet which screened at pornfilmfestival Berlin.

They began performing film criticism and commentary on FBi Radio in 2017 on their popular weekly show Movies Movies Movies, interviewing filmmakers and offering lateral reads of moving image culture from the sidelines of the mainstream.

During this time they began screening resourceful films at Pink Flamingo Cinema at semi-regular Garden Reflexxx presents events, inspired by the work of Dead End Film Festival which screened their films angel and Hailstorm alongside the work of far more famous and established filmmakers. The essence of the idea was to champion first films for their scrappiness and intention alongside major artists to create a flat ontology of ambition and talent. This blossomed into SWARM film festival at the Blacktown Drive In for Sydney World Pride, co-curated with Xuela and gi which was nominated for an FBi SMAC Award for best arts program in 2023.

Meanwhie they have created and shared multiple short films, including an online film festival called Bins in April 2020 for Seventh Gallery where they edited and captioned one film a day for 30 days.

Garden Reflexxx are focused on collaborating with different artists to help them realise their video dreams. This aspect of their practice truly began with Immortal Memories directed by Bhenji Ra, an online vigil for Trans Day of Remembrance in 2020 livestreamed to multiple locations around the world during covid.

They’ve also completed and toured two feature films; Grape Steak, a mumblecore comedy about a gay bashing inspired by real gossip and violence and Mood Ring directed by long time collaborator Sereima Adimate (Stelly G, Caledonian Road), which is a love-poem to Fiji and friendship.

They are currently finishing off their third feature, Avalon, about a passive aggressive relationship on tour between 87 year old Hippie Modernist performance and inflatable artist Evelyn Roth and her neighbour, current waitress Alison James (Jen’s mum).