Welcome to the Monoseum. My name is Ryan Andrew Lee. I'm a cinematographer and moving image artist working with documentary and experimental eco cinema. I grew up on the central coast of New South Wales and I'm now living in the inner west of Sydney. My art practice began when I started my degree at Kofa in Sydney. I actually started doing graphic design but switched over to media arts after a few months when I realised I didn't want to sit at a computer for my whole life. I was also filming little documentaries at the time and this naturally branched off into making moving image works. Today my practice looks pretty similar, just balancing working in the film industry on documentaries and long form drama and making moving image works in my time off. The Vale is a full-spectrum infrared video work that reveals locations of conflict and massacre in the early days of colonisation on the central coast of New South Wales I got the idea of the infrared from Richard Moss video work The Enclave which was a big inspiration for me when I was studying He used an infrared film stock which registered an invisible spectrum of light using this as a metaphorical link to bring to light the unseen and unthought of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Similarly I was using this medium of infrared as a conduit for truth-telling to shine a light on some of these places of conflict that a lot of people would not have been aware of. The audio for the work is just sound recorded in situ at the sites that I was filming at. I didn't really want to use music as I didn't want to take away from the viewer feeling like they were present at the sites. One piece of advice I'd give to someone beginning their practice would be just to find the one thing that you actually get excited about and just try not to veer away from that regardless of external influences both consciously and unconsciously.