MONTAGES: The Full Cut 1999 - 2015 - Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg

Free exhibition

Montages: The Full Cut, 1999 – 2015 presents the full suite of eight montage films by artist Tracey Moffatt and her long-time collaborator Gary Hillberg. Exhibited all together for the first time, these works span 16 years of their collaborative practice, from the first montage work created in 1999 to the latest in 2015.

Moffatt and Hillberg’s montages interrogate the nature of representation. The works utilise and expose common stereotypes in popular cinema, revealing the ways they come to inform our collective cultural imagination. Mining an extensive collection of iconic Hollywood films, telemovies and arthouse cinema, The Full Cut invents new fictions and plays with narrative and character conventions to create highly charged compositions on polemic themes such as love, art, revolution and destruction.

Lip, 1999, depicts black female servants talking back to their white bosses, implicitly tracing a history of race relations onscreen; Artist, 2000, portrays the Hollywood clichés of the lives of artists and their tempestuous whims; Love, 2003, is a commentary on classic cinema’s depiction of romance and intimacy, which also exposes darker themes of co-dependency and violence against women; Doomed, 2007, looks at cinematic portrayals of doomsday scenarios; REVOLUTION, 2008, confronts social power structures and struggles; Mother, 2009, is a compilation of archetypal maternal characters; Other, 2010, deconstructs the mix of desire and fear that defines the treatment of the ubiquitous ‘other’ in cinema; and The Art, 2015, examines the nature of the art world and its complex relationship with the market and commodification.

As a collective tour de force, The Full Cut decontextualises and reframes pervasive popular culture perspectives and representational conventions, revealing Moffatt and Hillberg’s great knowledge and command of the film genre. Each montage work remixes narrative chronologies to examine the complexities of subjectivity and perspective, as well as the influence of historical and cultural biases.

Moffatt is an acclaimed artist and filmmaker, and her works draw upon both popular culture and her own background, examining subjects such as Aboriginal subjugation, maternal domination, gender stereotypes and class division. Hillberg is a highly regarded experimental filmmaker, editor and music video producer.

8 films, total running time 1 hour 40 minutes, looped
All works courtesy the artists, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York.

Montages: The Full Cut, 1999 – 2015 was curated and developed by Artspace, Sydney and is touring nationally in partnership with Museums & Galleries of NSW.
 

Viewing with young audiences

This exhibition contains imagery which may not be suitable for young audiences. We strongly encourage visiting parents and educators to be present with their children and students in the exhibition to facilitate.
 

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