Eddie Ryan: The Weight of Things
Opening: 06 pm, Thurs 29 June 2023
Exhibition: 07 am – 07 pm, 29 June – 31 Jul 2023
Artist talk: 03 pm – 05 pm, Sat 01 Jul 2023
Matca Space for Photography
48 Ngoc Ha, Ba Dinh district, Hanoi
From the organizer:
The work quietly broaches the experience of the emigrant and the temporal fragility of the lives of those who must leave. It articulates their strategies of learning and assimilation – of survival even – in photographs tempered by the mores, sanctions and beliefs of the society in which they were made. The photographic act serves a fourfold purpose in this series – that of the dig of the archaeologist, that of the reflexive exploration of a society dependent on a migrant workforce to assist in the fulfillment of its ambition. The photographs also act as apertures of seeing and archaeological density maps, physical and conceptual ways of articulating being outside, being other.
Worked in both liminal and post-liminal states*, ‘The Weight of Things’ intended to make manifest the ‘in between’ I found myself in on a number of fronts: I was between there and home as neither permanent resident nor naturalised citizen; I was classed as an expatriate, not an economic migrant even though the latter was the fact. I was continuing to work out the subtleties of engaging in cultural enquiry in a specific geographic location, operating within the boundaries of respect and the law of the country that gave me a place to live when I needed it most. Through exploring these nonmaterial aspects, I made work that’s subtly evocative of the nature of the place, the experience of the transition to successfully abide there, and to ‘placemake’ using photography as a partial conceptual mapmaking of the terrain of the infra-ordinary, the anti-sublime.
‘The Weight of Things’ as a title refers to the subjects that helped to articulate this situation: everyday objects in displacement and limbo, totems of protection employed by the migrant; photographs that visually articulated leaving, memory, arrival, and partial assimilation.
About artist:
Eddie Ryan is a design educator and photographer currently living and working in Vietnam. A graduate of Central St Martins School of Art and Design, London, he began his creative career as a graphic designer. He utilises photography both figuratively and conceptually in digital and analogue forms, and his work has been exhibited physically, online and in print in Featureshoot, Air Magazine, ‘Behind The Portrait’ and ‘The Arab street II’ with Gulf Photo Plus, Vantage Point Sharjah 6, ‘The Art of Observation’ and ‘Car Habitats’ hosted by The Image Guide, and on Lensculture’s Critics Choice competition gallery. His work was also selected by Source Photographic Review as one of their MA/MFA selections for 2022 and was also chosen as one of The Pupilsphere’s Spotlight Artists the same year. He is a graduate of the MA Photography programme at the Belfast School of Art, Ulster University.
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