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

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.