Kildare Street gets new NEOPETS sculptures by artist Bunny Rogers

Dublin’s Kildare Street will soon be the sight of a new a new art installation by New York artist, Bunny Rogers.

The special eight-week exhibition, called NEOPETS, is part of a new, collaborative effort led by The Form Foundation to bring a selection of the most talked-about pieces of contemporary art to Ireland.

The NEOPETS exhibition takes place on Dublin’s Kildare Street, Dublin 2 from the October 5 to December 5.

Three of these Neopets (Techo Statue, Shoyru Statue and Chia Statue) will be on display as part of this exhibition.

“The artist, Bunny Rogers takes inspiration from online gaming and digital identities from her youth, to create brilliant, bold sculptures for this show-stopping NEOPETS exhibition,” the council says.

“Rogers’ towering bronze sculptures bear resemblance to ornate European gargoyles, but are brilliantly modernised in Rogers’ whimsical and bold artistic style.”

Speaking about the installation, Lord Mayor of Dublin, Caroline Conroy said: “These NEOPETS sculptures by Bunny Rogers are not to be missed.

“I’m delighted to see them take up residence in Dublin as a playful animation.

“The exhibition is sure to be a great addition to our city’s conversation-starting public art scene.”

A major reference for Rogers is the world of online gaming and the malleable identities associated with role-playing and fantasy communities.

“This interest was not born out of purely conceptual or aesthetic considerations, but instead developed seamlessly from Rogers’ own fascination and involvement with these platforms in her youth,” a spokesperson said.

“Her first forays into art can be traced to her experiments on the website Neopets.com: an immersive online universe popular in the early 2000s in which children created and tended to virtual pets. For Rogers, spending time on the internet as a child was equated with a freedom from isolation and her work thereby demonstrates an enchantment with online expressions of community.”

“My Neopets were real to me,” Rogers says, “I wished that I could visit Neopia and didn’t understand why I couldn’t.”