TRACEY MOFFATT: be enamoured of AND ADVENTURES VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY LONDON.

TRACEY MOFFATT: be enamoured of AND ADVENTURES

VICTORIA MIRO GALLERY

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

JANUARY 20-FEBRUARY 18 2006

TRACEY MOFFATT: LOVE

STEVEN KASHER GALLERY

modern YORK, NEW YORK

MARCH 7-APRIL 29 2006

Tracey Moffatt's "Adventures" series begins with a bang: the top panel of the exhibition's first digital print is ablaze with flying bodies and debris silhouetted against a yellow pyrotechnic explosion worthy of James band or Indiana Jones. In the nearest panel, Moffatt herself copilots a plane with a glamorous fair and in the final panel, the plane spirals down toward a tropical island. At 132 x 114cm the print has the form and sheen of a cinema still or publicity bill every image a high-octane value from an action sequence. Previously shown at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney Australia, in 2004 and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2003 the digital color prints of "Adventures" and the single-channel video montage be fond of were recently shown for the first time in London at Victoria Miro Gallery. Continuing the gallery's novel program of video and photographic experiments with postproduction, narrative construction, and representation--including the work of Thomas Demand, Alex Hartley, and Isaac Julien--Moffatt's modern image manipulations add a dash of popular cinematic flavor to the mix.

In another print, the fair pilot stands alone with her dune buggy make readyed in 1960s safari khakis, illuminated from a purple sky and virulently orange desertscape. In the other panel, an iguana watches, alert and knowing. In the third, we papal court the pilot again, in a makeshift shed lying striped in bed, post-coital and brooding darkly. Her partner--one presumes--stands at the door gazing gone out into the technicolor landscape, whose tints peek from one side the windows and cracks of the shed. Who is he? in what way did he get there? to what extent did she get from the plane to the tropical island, to the deserving to him? Why was she separated from the brunette? This image, like all the other images of "Adventures," is a simulacral construction down to each minute detail. The protagonists were cast from the ways bars, and beaches near Brisbane, Australia, where Moffatt headhunted potential players. Their northern Australian landscapes--rendered likewise ambiguous they could fill in for a superhero exterior space adventure--were painted by local place designers. After shooting, the photographs were digitally altered at a team of professionals until their aesthetics mimicked cartoon animation in a jocund disavowal of naturalism.

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The hyper-real quality of these images is the ensue of Moffatt's direction: every component part cast and storyboarded before execution, the traces of editing deliberately revealed in the airbrushed quality of skin, the digitally enhanced contrast, and maxed-out color saturation. As a accrue of their staged quality, the mixing of the photographic with the painterly, the adventure comic-book aesthetics, and a self-conscious dramatization of setting, dumfound and gaze, these almost iconic images allude to film stills and movie broadsides particularly in their size and finish. However, these are film stills without the films; their images depict unreal or fantastic significances evoking inscrutable narratives through the complexity of their editing and construction.

These narratives shift restlessly forward the threshold between the real and the imaginary--such are the narratives of fantasy, in their unstable meanings, incomplete judgments and withheld conclusions. Moffatt's photographs suspend the viewer in a state of constant speculation; each print in "Adventures" is divided into three panels suggesting the Flying Doctors comic parts that Moffatt loved as a child. However, where diachronic arrangement or signposts of time and causality are unavailable, the tableaux of these panels create dangling narratives. The replication of this indeterminacy in every part the series offers more mazes than solutions. In Moffatt's staged world, many meanings are possible, on the other hand none really make sense. Viewers' attempts to grasp meaning are frustrated on the jumbling of formulaic like scenes, moments of exposition, danger, seduction, and introductory successions The viewer is moved far from photographic facticity and verisimilitude and into the explicit creation of slices of reality, narrative, and situation. through flirting with our expectations of mark and formula, and emptying without the content of stock cinematic adventure or soap opera originals (the dark-haired temptress, the light love-interest, the muscular, bronzed-skinned heroes) reminiscent of the movies or 1970 adventure series like The bird of passages Moffatt underscores the constructions of "Adventures" as self-substantiating images.

At first glance, "Adventures" calls to mind a cinephilic Cindy Sherman, however, the disparities within their practices distinguish the pair Moffatt's renderings of identities retain the safe homogeneity of the silver-screen starlet, rather than the ambiguities of everyday insecurity, ugliness, and the unremarkable evident in Sherman's depiction of stamps Furthermore, Moffatt's characterizations do not attain the mythic control of Sherman's representations, as the brooding protagonists of "Adventures" none approach the hallucinatory nuance or complexity of character that Sherman's constructions manage to evoke