GILES RYDER
Giles Ryder, SURFACE/ MANDALAS FOR THE LOST (installation view), Animated Led light works digital print, Perspex vinyl gel ‘haze screen’, 60cm diameter. Photography courtesy of Matthew Stanton Photography.
Giles Ryder is a multi-disciplinary artist based between South East Asia and Australia. A graduate of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia he also undertook Postgraduate studies at Sydney College of Art and Kunsthochschule Berlin, with funding from Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. Ryder was a previous recipient of the ARTAND Australia/Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award in 2006 and was an Asian Pacific Artist Fellow at Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2011.
Ryder has situated his practice within South East Asia (Thailand and Cambodia predominantly) as a means of expanding on his particular aesthetics and attacking the history of cultural appropriation and colonialism, by using the ‘exotic’ location of Thailand as a distancing tool.
Ryder reacts to the notion of ‘lost in the tropics’ and an incorrectly placed notion of being in a ‘Paradise’ to produce self-exiled abstractions in the wilderness of the wild east, by pointing towards self-authorship and myth of artists such as Blinky Palermo (his character name, that of a new world underground character) and Paul Gauguin (the explorer / traveller and storyteller). It is here that the works are both dislocated and relocated via this fracturing of both Western and Eastern ideals. A foreigner creating formalist works in the East, he is compounding and conflating these histories to create experiential narratives, which belong equally and unequivocally in both domains equivalently.
Ryder’s work is held in both Public including Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Artbank, Sydney; and Griffith Artworks, Brisbane. Ryder’s works are included in private collections in Austria, Dusseldorf, Berlin, Munich, Leiden, Netherlands, Edinburgh, London, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
Ryder teaches at Bangkok University International and has also taught at Sydney College of the Arts / The University of Sydney and King Mongkut’s University of Technology Ladkrabaeng in Thailand.
Ryder is represented by MARS Gallery Melbourne Australia, H Gallery Bangkok Thailand and First Floor Gallery Harare, Zimbabwe South Africa.
