Tracey Moffatt
Montages
30 Jun - 01 Oct 2017
Tracey Moffatt
OTHER, 2009
collaboration with Gary Hillberg
courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
OTHER, 2009
collaboration with Gary Hillberg
courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
Tracey Moffatt (Brisbane, Australia, 1960) works with video, film and photography, drawing on the field of visual culture. The artist uses film directing techniques and images from cinema, art history and popular culture around the themes of sexuality and identity. The videos in this show — LOVE (2003), OTHER (2009) and LIP (1999) — are part of the series Montages (1999–2015), made with footage from cult classics and Hollywood films, in collaboration with film editor Gary Hillberg. These works focus on stereotypes and representations of gender, social class and otherness in cinema.
LOVE is a combination of excerpts from films in which heterosexual romantic love is represented by passionate declarations of love, breakups, rejections or violence. The drama of the scenes is intensified by a soundtrack that follows the different stages of a relationship, in a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. The video reveals how male and female roles are translated into cinematographic clichés. In the scenes, love is the battlefield that unveils power relations based on gender and social positions.
In OTHER, colonization and desire are fused in Hollywood’s “non-Western” representations. Identity and colonization are main themes in the work of Moffatt, who has an aboriginal background. The other is interpreted as the exotic seducer, able to trigger fear, curiosity, fascination and sexual desire in the white colonizer. As the narrative unfolds, the encounters between “colonized” and “colonizer” are intensified, culminating in the sexual act per se, abolishing frontiers and differences between them. The video also reveals a frequent narrative construction on colonization conveyed by cinema, which, through the eroticizing of the other, romantically placates violent colonial histories.
LIP brings together excerpts from films in which black actresses play the roles of cleaners, nannies, cooks and waitresses “answering” to their bosses, white women. The title is a reference to the expression “giving lip,” which means speaking to someone in an impertinent way, for instance, when a subaltern makes insolent comments to a superior. Moffatt’s chosen characters invert the notion of subservience as their humor and irony is a satire of racist and classist behaviors.
This show dialogues with the exhibitions Toulouse-Lautrec in Red; Miguel Rio Branco: Whn I Die I Will Take Nothing; Wanda Pimentel: Involvements and Who’s afraid of Teresinha Soares? — which make up MASP’s annual program dealing with the theme of sexuality.
LOVE is a combination of excerpts from films in which heterosexual romantic love is represented by passionate declarations of love, breakups, rejections or violence. The drama of the scenes is intensified by a soundtrack that follows the different stages of a relationship, in a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. The video reveals how male and female roles are translated into cinematographic clichés. In the scenes, love is the battlefield that unveils power relations based on gender and social positions.
In OTHER, colonization and desire are fused in Hollywood’s “non-Western” representations. Identity and colonization are main themes in the work of Moffatt, who has an aboriginal background. The other is interpreted as the exotic seducer, able to trigger fear, curiosity, fascination and sexual desire in the white colonizer. As the narrative unfolds, the encounters between “colonized” and “colonizer” are intensified, culminating in the sexual act per se, abolishing frontiers and differences between them. The video also reveals a frequent narrative construction on colonization conveyed by cinema, which, through the eroticizing of the other, romantically placates violent colonial histories.
LIP brings together excerpts from films in which black actresses play the roles of cleaners, nannies, cooks and waitresses “answering” to their bosses, white women. The title is a reference to the expression “giving lip,” which means speaking to someone in an impertinent way, for instance, when a subaltern makes insolent comments to a superior. Moffatt’s chosen characters invert the notion of subservience as their humor and irony is a satire of racist and classist behaviors.
This show dialogues with the exhibitions Toulouse-Lautrec in Red; Miguel Rio Branco: Whn I Die I Will Take Nothing; Wanda Pimentel: Involvements and Who’s afraid of Teresinha Soares? — which make up MASP’s annual program dealing with the theme of sexuality.