Unchained Melody

Unchained Melody

Conor Clarke

Two Rooms
16 Putiki Street, Newton, Auckland

31 May - 6 July 2019

Preview Thursday 30 May 6-8pm

Part of the Auckland Festival of Photography

Conor Clarke, Unchained Melody, 2018, HD Video (still)

During her 2018 Tylee Cottage residency at the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, photographer Conor Clarke introduced the mediums of sound and moving-image to her studio practice. The 12 minute moving-image work,Unchained Melody, is the result of this period of experimentation. While signalling a new direction for the artist, Unchained Melody is a work that retains fidelity to Clarke’s enduring critical and ecological concerns. Working with single-channel video and two-channel audio, Clarke has composed a collective ‘typology’ of waters found flowing throughout the city of Whanganui, paying particular attention to sites of cultural and environmental intervention. Ranging from the apparently gentle – the city’s botanical gardens, decorative water features, storm water drains – to the larger, industrial workings of wastewater plant and local dam, this complex aural and visual landscape acts as a vector for her ongoing interrogation of the enmeshment of human experience in the living forces of the wider world.