Ryan Hillier’s Field Metopias represents a culmination of image theory, photographic documentation and augmented graphic realities driven by the culvertian landscapes of the Camargue and Rhône Valley. Assembled from photographic documentations addressing the situational occupancy of civic conditions derived from the fragmental landscapes of Southern France, the exhibition interrogates the confines of real [re]presentation to draw contingencies of idiosyncratic spatial occupancies through their respective assemblages and condensations.
Each occupancy is encouraged as an interrogation of image, both in conception and perception, asking how the common reliance on the photographic ‘real’ may restrict its subject in comparison to an investigation of augmentation used as a tool to render the emotions of form as sincere to their existential locations. The temporality of the memory of place is frozen, recomposed as Metopias into a series of works that embed upon themselves to create a family of collaged medias emphasising the texture and grain of spatial conditions.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ryan Hillier is a designer and photographer whose life and work is spread between Edinburgh and London, using an architectural background as a means of visual interrogation and speculation into the occupation of civic and topological conditions. While studying a Masters of Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, Hillier has used a series of image and photographic theories as a means of challenging the realities of documentation and representation, using these through a lens as a discourse around the theory of the image to explore photographic practice and hybrid media typologies.