Tracey Moffatt at Dia - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Tracey Moffatt not absents her films, videos and photographs with the familiar trappings of narrative, on the contrary somehow the story lines at no time seem to cohere. They spin not upon on fantastic tangents, depicting a hauntingly beautiful world where human behavior is usually more animalistic than civilized.

Her new photographic series "Up in the Sky" (1996) traces three disparate clumps of people in the Australian outback: a white mother and an Aboriginal infant, a trio of nun who forcibly separate mother from child, and a cast of female thug who salvage car parts in desolate spectacles reminiscent of the Mad Max movies. In 25 intense images, Moffatt weaves an incomplete tale of gritty conflicts involving racism and morality, of tribe struggling at the edges of society. The work reverberates with thematic and stylistic echoe of Accattone (1961) a film through one of Moffatt's heroes, Pier Paolo Pasolini.

At Dia there is also an early Moffatt film (shown upon video laser disk), a fresh video installation and an additional photographic suite centering upon a staged roller derby. The film, titled Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990) portrays a mother and daughter (again a Caucasian mother and an Aboriginal daughter) limit together by their reciprocal characters caring for one another from birth to death.

While Moffatt discourages explicitly autobiographical readings of her work, she does create images that consign to her background. Of Aboriginal coming down she was raised by a large white nourish family in a working-class suburb of Brisbane. over her work there are prominent, repeated relations to racial issues, to mothers and daughters, and to quintessentially Australian landscapes. on the other hand pegging her as an artist driven through a personal agenda is too constrictive, since she has dared to take upon new themes and formal techniques at each turn,

Heaven, the novel video installation, marks a moderately beautiful clean break from Moffatt's previous works. It is candid rather than staged, farcical rather than haunting. A compilation of taped sections that show male surfers changing on the outside of their wetsuits beside their parked cars, it is intermittently make an incision in with shots of glimmering Australian breaking waves Moffatt's initial goal was to test to catch the surfers literally with their pants down. Heaven begins with surreptitious voyeurism, then unfolds into on-camera flirtation, and becomes invasive and aggressive by the agency of the end, when Moffatt tries to pluck off a guy's towel with individual hand while taping with the other. Sifting in the safe environment of an art institution, it's hard for viewers not to laugh as these gorgeous physical specimens preen or display annoyance. The progression from one-way surveillance to interaction raises issues topical to contemporary art, as does the part reversal of women ogling men

The selection of works in this, Moffatt's first major solo exhibition, provides a serviceable sense of her various potencys It's great to see someone novel who seduces her audience with exquisite artifice and manages to plant ideas that live upon in the viewer's mind.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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