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Off the Well Worn Path
21 February - 4 March
Ryley Clarke
Off the Well Worn Path
21 February- 4 March 2023
hours:
Tuesday – Friday: 12pm – 7pm
Saturdays: 12pm – 4pm
admission: Free
..his personal work proposes to illuminate light on issues which require further understanding…
A few months ago, my mother sold her childhood home. It’s been an overwhelming and exhausting journey to clear the place. Originally built by my Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother, over time it has quietly decayed away. Once loved, the dust took over. Books, unopened boxes, and hoarded objects filled the rooms and hallways.
Restoring a place that is filled with so many memories, bright and dark, melancholic and vibrant, has tested my mother’s perseverance. Despite that, in the midst of a pandemic, the devotion I witnessed to give this home some kind of new meaning in its next life has made her true strengths shine. And I couldn’t be prouder.
Throughout the years we spent working on clearing the rooms bit by bit, I occasionally pulled out my camera to make photographs of the ever precarious moments that symbolised the end of its journey for my mother and our family. Focusing on the process, transformation and experience of clearing and restoring my mother’s childhood home, we encounter familial possessions once thought lost and reminisce about moments from here and there.
Observing the relationship of the human condition, time, family and place Off the Well-Worn Path seeks to connect the past and present through inheritance and regeneration. It seeks to explore an open dialogue that seeks to exchange the ever-increasing tension internally and externally of a childhood home, losing its relationship with its kin. Yet through this time, finding solitude and healing.
Ryley Clarke (b.1999) is an emerging photographer and director living and working in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.
Ryley weaves together evocative, introspective and cinematic photographs. Often seen with a camera in his hands or around his shoulders, he creates with spontaneity, natural tendency and direction. His earliest memories of making photographs and films in his youth have led him to capture a diverse range of visual subjects. From his vibrant, soulful vision of the Australian live music scene to his personal, introspective visual projects, his work encapsulates a spirited, creative and visionary approach to storytelling.
In his effort to explore complex dialogues, his personal work proposes to illuminate light on issues which require further understanding. Suggesting an exchange that is often contemplative, he seeks to abandon traditional ways of seeing, to question what is being observed without passivity or judgement. Whether he is spending the day on long-term visual projects or working commercially in the studio, he often creates sequences that open up imaginative, contemplative and rhythmic dialogues.
In 2020, Ryley was awarded the Baillot and Balfour Endowment for his ongoing visual narrative and self-published photobook, As Memories & Time Entwine, A Hanging Branch Connects Us. His visual and written work has been extensively published in Savage Thrills, The British Journal of Photography, NME, Beat Magazine and has exhibited his photographs at SunStudios, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Bluethumb Art Gallery, MGA and FortyFiveDownstairs. Often presenting his work in various solo and group exhibitions, his work takes form in publications and installations.
Ryley would like to acknowledge, with deep respect, the sovereignty of the Wurundjeri people as the first custodians of the land on which I work and live. I pay my respect to Elders past, present and emerging and extend this respect to all Indigenous Australians nations. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
Website: www.ryleyclarke.com
Instagram: www.instagram.com/ryleyclarke