The Tourist 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.
Our Artist in Residence for February, Rory Duckhouse, trawls through his extensive archive to present us with a series of pictures from 2014.
Here, Rory states that “photography is intrinsically linked with cultural tourism, and the act of taking a photograph is in itself a value judgement. To take a photograph is an act of inclusion and exclusion, by pointing the lens at a scene, we are making a critical decision on what deserves to be within the frame.”
“Using tourist images of China from the 1930s, the point of exclusion has been furthered by highlighting areas within the scene. The photograph is only able to represent a tiny part of our experience but is still an essential part of any visit. The work attempts to move away from the exoticism of another culture by presenting the common traits of the city, the buildings and city streets.”
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.
This contribution by Rory Duckhouse featuring his piece The Tourist is part of the new Artists in Residence series.
