Ashley Perry
Ashley Perry
(b. 1972, Horsham, Victoria. Lives and works in Melbourne)
Ashley Perry is a self-taught photographer with an interest in making images that represent everyday suburban spaces in Melbourne. His photographs frequently depict the uneasy coexistence between natural and cultivated environments.
Perry continues his exploration of Melbourne’s suburbs in four photographic works presented at Melbourne Now. From concrete landscapes to greenery intersected by electrical infrastructure, the scenes in Perry’s works are devoid of people – but not of their impact. Made during lockdown at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when, as the artist puts it, Melbourne seemed ‘suspended in time’, the photographs in this series observe spaces that are at once private and open; familiar yet strangely disjointed. Central to Perry’s approach is a detached perspective, drawing on influences such as the landscape photography of Paul Graham and Joachim Brohm, two photographers similarly concerned with documenting unembellished depictions of everyday sites.
Perry holds a PhD in Communications Studies from RMIT University. He has exhibited at the Centre of Contemporary Photography (2020 Ilford CCP Salon), and his short films have screened at the St Kilda Film Festival (2019, 2018, 2017). In 2021 he was a finalist in the 2021 William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize and exhibited in the open program of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.