Tyler Rollins Fine Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Tracey Moffatt, taking place in our Chelsea gallery from January 13 – February 26, 2011. Entitled Still and Moving, it features her recent photographic series, Plantation, as well as Other, the final work in her Montages video series inspired by Hollywood films.
Moffatt is one of today’s leading international visual artists working in photography, film and video. Many of her photographs and short films have achieved iconic status both in her home country of Australia and around the world. Her photographs play with many different printing processes and have a filmic, narrative quality. Moffatt approaches all her photographic and video work as a film director, and she is known as a powerful visual storyteller.
In a series of 12 diptychs, Plantation sets up an elusive narrative centered around the haunting figure of a man lurking around a colonial-style plantation house in a tropical setting. The atmosphere is one of mystery and menace, desire and longing, evoking issues of race, class, and colonialism in an open-ended manner that shies away from the ideological rigidities of direct, linear narrative, leaving each of us the room to follow our own chain of associations, perhaps arriving at some kind of self-critique. The images are printed on a textured, handmade paper, with added watercolor touches, giving the works the aura of rare vintage objects, fragile relics of another time yet very modern in their cinematic drama. In contrast, Other presents a more light-hearted view of relationships between racial and ethnic groups as seen through the lens of Hollywood, yet it brings to the fore the mixture of desire, violence, and exoticism that inform the image of the “native” in popular culture.
Born in Brisbane in 1960, Moffatt studied visual communications at the Queensland College of Art, from which she graduated in 1982. Since her first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1989, she has exhibited extensively in museums all over the world. Moffatt first gained significant critical acclaim when her 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.
Moffatt was selected for the international section of the 1997 Venice Biennale and has also been featured in the biennials of Liverpool (2008), São Paulo (1998), Gwangju (1995), and Sydney (2008, 2000, 1996, 1993), as well as the Asia-Pacific Triennial (2009-10). A major exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997-98 consolidated her international reputation. In 2003, a large retrospective exhibition of Moffatt’s work was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, to record-breaking attendances, and in 2004 it traveled to the Hasselblad Museum in Sweden. In 2006, she had her first retrospective exhibition in Italy, at Spazio Oberdan, Milan. In 2007, her photographic series, Scarred For Life, was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and her video, Love, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Also that year, she was awarded the prestigious Infinity award for art photography, selected by an international panel at the International Center of Photography in New York City. A retrospective exhibition of Moffatt’s video montages has just ended at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. Her work will be featured in a number of international museum shows in 2011.
Tracey Moffatt is represented by Tyler Rollins Fine Art in North America.
