Two exhibitions
dal 19/1/2006 al 17/3/2006
Segnalato da
19/1/2006
Two exhibitions
Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Smadar Dreyfus: Lifeguards is a dual screen audiovisual installation that examines the way culture is embedded in speech and how identity is constructed through language. Tracey Moffatt: the artist's work reformulates stylistic motifs of popular and visual arts culture. Mining the images and narratives of her vast visual memory, she draws particular inspiration from the film and television she was exposed to as a child.
Smadar Dreyfus
Lifeguards
Developed over three years of research by the artist, Lifeguards
is a dual screen audiovisual installation that examines the way culture
is embedded in speech and how identity is constructed through language.
The installation insists upon complete immersion of the viewer,
exploring the contrasts between aural and visual perception, between
sound and silence, light and darkness. In one projection we observe a
group of women and children bathing at a Tel Aviv beach in complete
silence. This calm is interrupted by an abrupt soundscape of
lifeguards voices instructing the bathers through their megaphones.
Their speech is simultaneously translated into English subtitles across
a black screen, which are precisely synchronised with the commanding
voices. Through their vocal direction of the crowds, the lifeguards
actually describe the scene on the beach.
Central to Lifeguards is the
detachment of sound from image, which allows space for an open
interpretation of the work and focuses the viewers attention on what
is left unsaid and unseen. This sense of ambiguity is generated by the
subtle shifts between the protective content of the lifeguars
language and its authoritative delivery. Their prolonged calls to look
out for a missing child, to be aware of the jellyfish and to stay away
from the jetty are underpinned by a sense of unease. As the artist
concludes: The seafront, a place of relaxation and perhaps
reflection, is transformed into a place where the threshold of
normality is redefined.
Smadar Dreyfus was born in Tel Aviv in 1963. She studied at the Slade
School of Fine Art after completing a master degree in illustration
and photography at Royal College of Art in 1992. Her work has recently
been included in the 9th International Istanbul Biennial and IKON
Gallery Off-site, Birmingham and will also be included in forthcoming
exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel, Museo
de Arte Contempora'neo de Castilla y Leo'n (MUSAC), Spain, and CAPC Muse'e
Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France in 2006. She currently works and
lives in London.
Lifeguards is supported by
Arts Council of England, Steim Foundation, Amsterdam, Projection
Design, Norway, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam, and Ascent Media Group,
London.
---------------------------------------
Tracey Moffatt
Adventures
Highly regarded for her formal and stylistic experimentation in film,
photography and video, Moffatt's work reformulates stylistic motifs of
popular and visual arts culture. Mining the images and narratives of
her vast visual memory, she draws particular inspiration from the film
and television she was exposed to as a child.
In a manner analogous to filmmaking, Moffatt employs cinematic staging,
artful composition and orchestrated choreography in her photographs to
create the striking comic-strip style tableaux of Adventures.
Combining The Flying Doctors comic books she read as a child, 1970s
television and a dash of Moffat directs a team of models,
designers and graphic artists to manufacture the glossy retro artifice
of the photographs. The artist herself is complicit in the
action, in one scene cast as pilot steering a plane into a fiery
inferno, in another, as temptress.
As is characteristic of her previous work, Adventures
is driven and styled by an unregulated narrative, in which the
stereotypes of race and gender - the poster boy hero, the exotic, the submissive starlet - are played out to ambiguous ends.
Each of the ten photographs is divided into three frames, and within
each of these an individual story is composed. Deliberately resisting
linear narrative, Moffatt prefers to leave the work and its cinematic
imagery open to imaginative interpretation.
In the project gallery, Tracey Moffatt presents Love, a video piece that revisits
the cut-and-paste format used in Lip 1999 and Artist,
2000, carefully splicing together scenes from some of the artists
favourite Hollywood melodramas. Cinematic cliche' gives way to a darkly
sexy feminism with hours of film edited to a succession of passionate
embraces, acts of betrayal, frenzied violence and finally revenge.
Born in 1960 in Brisbane, Tracey Moffatt is Australia's most successful
artist internationally. She has produced 10 short films and 17 photo
series in the past 20 years and has had many solo exhibitions in Europe
and the U.S. with major surveys at the Museum for Contemporary Art,
Sydney in 2003, the Centre Nationale de la Photographie, Paris in 1999
and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York in 1997. In the 1980s and
early 90s she worked as a director on documentaries and music videos
for television. Her film work is critically acclaimed, with two films
selected for Cannes Film Festival in 1990 and 1993 respectively. Tracey
Moffatt lives and works in New York and Australia.
Image: Tracey Moffatt, Adventure Series 10, 2004. Colour print on Fujiflex paper, from a series of ten images 132 x 114 cm
Victoria Miro Gallery
16 Wharf Road - London
Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 6pm
Admission free