Line of Sight is a selection of work by Rory Duckhouse as part of the Artists in Residence series. Throughout 2017 artists, including Rory Duckhouse will take a leading creative role in what Wales Arts Review publishes, centring their skills on a challenging project over the course of a month. We were inundated with applications, receiving hundreds of emails about the positions, and it was no easy task whittling down all that talent to this final eleven. Our team of six editors debated long into the night, and in the end, we decided on a collection of people who we most want to work with, and whose work excites us. We think you will be excited by them too.
Rory Duckhouse is an artist and writer based in Cardiff, Wales. Rory’s work looks at ideas of information and control, his mixed-media practice works across image and text to look at how our behaviour can be influenced by external factors. Trained as a photographer, his work is concerned with our relationship to photography and how the photograph is perceived as a document. Taking the photograph as a piece of information, he looks at how the layering of time has an effect on the veracity of the image. Photography is a powerful medium, both personally and in the media but is very much a subjective art form. We create more images now than ever before, but what is the legacy of these images and how could this information be misused? Using this as a platform, Rory’s work explores the space between photography, history, information, control & technology amongst many other ideas.
During this residency, Rory will be working on a number of image-based and text works for his upcoming exhibition at the Oriel Davies testbed space. He will be working on a series of participatory artworks that will be sent out in the post as an extension of the gallery show. These works will include proposals, crosswords and other work developed through the residency.
You find out more about Rory and his unique work from his website, alternatively, you can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
Here Rory describes the thought process behind these works: “In the 1890s, the psychologist Ivan Pavlov ran a series of experiments on the act of conditioning. Pavlov was looking at the salivation of dogs and noticed they began to salivate when he entered the room, this association between him and the dogs led to the idea of classical conditioning, they associated Pavlov with food and began to salivate when they saw him.”
“Using archival images of Pavlov’s dogs, the work looks at how we interact with an image, being conditioned to look at certain areas while not noticing others. Line of Sight is an investigation into the act of looking, and how we are led through an image. By both leading the viewer through an image and denying them the pleasure of looking, the work aims to ask questions about how we form our modes of looking and the way we are unconsciously led through an image.”
Further exploring the archive of our Artist in Residence, Rory Duckhouse, we present a series of pieces from 2014 entitled ‘Line of Sight’.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
This contribution by Rory Duckhouse featuring a selection of his work called Line of Sight – #8 is part of the new Artists in Residence series.
