Tracy Moffatt "Social Edit"
Location One
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Location One presents three important films by Australian video pioneer Tracey Moffatt, perhaps one of the most revolutionary women artists to have ever worked in that medium. Known for her enchantingly beautiful yet often times dark portrayals of the role of subaltern “others” in both her native Australia and from cultures around the world, Moffatt’s narrative films offer the viewer a penetrative gaze into the realities and implicit fantasies that subjugation based on race and gender churns out. In her dual role as cultural critic and maker of art, Moffatt combines hard-edged life experiences with the technologies of video and photography to seam together pastiche-like vignettes that open a window onto the lives of her characters, whether that be an Australian aborigine or an African-American woman. In so doing, Moffatt not only presents the voice of “the other,” but perhaps more importantly provides a way out of the oft-times inescapable confines of racism, sexism and homophobia found in all corners of the globe. By granting her characters and viewers their own voice, Moffatt becomes champion of the subjugated and mediator between the lived here-and-now and the utopian world that many of us fantasize about one day realizing.
In the suite of videos on view in Social Edit, Moffatt, in collaboration with film editor Gary Hillberg, uses a strategy much different from her more well-known narrative films. Here, she utilizes montage and fracturing to literally excavate and mine the history of Hollywood films to create short movies that address the horrors of racism, Armageddon and destruction of things beautiful. Each work, culled from snippets of both early and contemporary films, some readily familiar and others completely unknown, becomes a thought-provoking journey into the collective memory of humankind, marked by the institutionalized-on-film traces of ill will that have been both opaquely and directly presented to us over the course of our lifetimes. By exposing the moments of subjugation found in Hollywood movies over the decades, whether in the form of racist rhetoric, visual depictions of the end of the world, or the creation and destruction of works of art, Moffatt allows us to rethink and reposition the implicit meaning of these brief filmic moments that might seem innocent one-by-one, but which produce a most ominous threat when bundled together one after another in a nonstop sequence that shocks and awakens in equal measure.
Media
Schedule
from February 26, 2008 to April 19, 2008