Photography – Canberra
Rory King’s work sits in the hybrid space between documentary practice and personal narratives fleshed out through an evocative and ambiguous visual discourse. Primarily shooting his work in black and white, and driven extensively by analogue photographic techniques, King is interested in the dualities and juxtapositions of human experience, the unseen personalities living on the fringes of society, the tensions between nostalgia, melancholia, the sublime, and our psychological landscapes.
King received the National Gallery of Australia Summer Art Scholarship for photography in 2011, was awarded the 2017 Glebe Art Show Photography Prize and was also named one of the up-and-coming artists of 2018 by Vogue, Australia. He has shown strongly across his early career in group exhibitions, most recently in G L O S S (2017) at Stairwell Gallery, Could this all be it? (2017) at Cold Cuts Gallery, Sydney, CCP Salon Exhibition (2017), Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Degenerate & Six (2018), Degenerate & Six Gallery, Canberra, and Crossing Borders (2018), Glass Room Projects, Darlinghurst. King is also the current 2018 PhotoAccess ‘Dark Matter’ Resident.
In 2018 he presented his work in, 'A Safer Place to Scream' for the annual Clyde & Co Art Award in Sydney, Australia, and is currently working on a major body of work, ‘O P A L: Pure Gift For The Holy Days’ - a year-long social documentary project exploring the decline of Australia’s opal mining industry and the individuals lives that have been
affected by it.
Concerned with modes of fabricating and disseminating both intimate and grand narratives, King’s images fluctuate through the pairing of interior and exterior spaces, which metaphorically serve as a reflection of our expansive psychological mindsets.
King graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art majoring in Photomedia at National Art School in 2017.