TRACEY MOFFATT is Australia’s most accomplished visual artist. She has exhibited extensively all over the world and has garnered strong support from museums, critics and collectors. Since 1989, Tracey Moffatt has had 119 solo exhibits and has been featured in over 150 group exhibitions.
ADVENTURES SERIES, a collection of 10 large photographic works that play with pop-cultural staples such as comic strips, television and B-movies. Tracey Moffatt says:
“I love early-1970’s modern adventure stories in comics and movies, especially low-budget American and Australian television dramas. In these productions ‘adventure’ meant jumping into a speedboat or a small plane to catch a ‘poacher’ and the stories were always set in exotic locations.”
Each work in the series incorporates three “frames” that depict an open-ended story. Each of the featured characters represents a type; Tracey Moffatt herself appears in the role of the “dark and intense” type. Tracey Moffatt states:
“I like constructing narratives in the studio with model-actors and props and painted backdrops…. I have always liked ‘artifice.’ I adore the ‘fake.’”
As a teenager, Tracey Moffatt aspired to look like these televised adventure characters. Tracey Moffatt pinpoints the allure of these characters when she says:
“All the men and women looked ‘professional’ as if they were doing something ‘important’ yet at the same time eyeing each other. To me it was all so sexual and hot.”
Tracey Moffatt’s twenty minute video entitled LOVE also explores Hollywood conventions and also turns a critical eye on relationships between men and women. Tracey Moffatt writes:
“Love is a rollercoaster montage of some of my favorite Hollywood melodramas depicting love scenes, which in the end turn out to be not so romantic.”
These love scenes are drawn from recognizable films spanning several eras. In Love Tracey Moffatt elicits a powerful response in the viewer through editing and music. The selected film clips, at first romantic and sweet, captivate the viewer and entice her in as the scenes crescendo into the violent and frightening.
Love comes with a disclaimer: If you have ever been in love or ever want to be, do not watch this video!
TRACEY MOFFATT is highly regarded for her formal and stylistic experimentation in film, photography and video. Her work draws on history of cinema, art and photography as well as popular culture and her own childhood memories and fantasies. Born in Brisbane Australia in 1960, Tracey Moffatt studied visual communications at the Queensland college of Art, from which she graduated in 1982. Since her first solo exhibition in Sydney in 1989, she has exhibited extensively all over the world. In the 1980’s and early 90’s she worked as a director on documentaries and music videos for television. She first gained significant critical acclaim for her film work when the short film Night Cries was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film, bedevil, was also selected for Cannes in 1993. A major exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997/8 consolidated her international reputation. Her work is in over fifty public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is now based in New York and returns frequently to the north of Australia where she works and lives on the beach.
The Steven Kasher Gallery is now serving as Tracey Moffatt’s exclusive representative in the United States. Its first exhibition of Tracey Moffatt’s work, entitled Love and Adventures, features both photography and video. It is Tracey Moffatt’s first exhibition in New York since 2001.
TRACEY MOFFATT, LOVE AND ADVENTURES
March 7, 2006 - April 29, 2006
Steven Kasher Gallery is located at 521 West 23rd St., 2nd Floor
Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm
Opening reception from 6-8pm on Tuesday, March 7, 2006
