The National Portrait Gallery
The Illumination
Inferno by Ryan Presley
Ryan Presley is a Marri Ngarr artist whose work challenges traditional power structures and questions how portraiture has historically been used to reinforce ideologies of conquest and colonisation.
Commissioned for the 2025 Enlighten Festival, Inferno is an animation work that extends the narratives and imagery that appear in Presley’s major mural installation Paradise won, which has been on display at the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery for the past 12 months.
The scenes in Inferno, like Paradise won, are based on the lived experiences of the artist’s friends and family, who become heroic figures that evoke the portrayals of the saints and archangels in Christian iconography. With their flaming halos, they are depicted in acts of resistance, confrontation and escape.
In this animation, systems of subjugation and control are represented as monsters but also through instruments of surveillance; CCTV cameras, or helicopters who scan the earth for mining companies. Perspectives shift as the narrative vignettes fold into one another. Each scene plays with the line between control and release: across shifting landscapes, our heroes outwit and outrun these agents of destruction with courage, resilience and strength. This work, and the mural that precedes it, celebrates First Nations survival and autonomy.
The Artist
Dr. Ryan Presley was born in 1987 in Alice Springs, and currently lives and works in Brisbane. Presley’s practice considers and questions themes of power and culture. His conceptual approach examines how communal experiences accrue over time; filtering through art, politics, perceptions of history and how event are remembered and reflected. Presley’s expressions are typically portrayed through a variety of mark making via traditional oil painting, drawing, video media and writing.
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