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MONTAGES: THE FULL CUT, 1999 - 2015

Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre is pleased to present all eight montage films by artist Tracey Moffatt and her long-time collaborator Gary Hillberg. Exhibited together for the first time, these works span 16 years of their collaborative practice, from the first montage created in 1999 to the latest in 2015. Montages: The Full Cut, 1999 –2015 is a major touring exhibition curated and developed by Artspace, Sydney and touring nationally in partnership with Museums & Galleries of NSW.

Montages: The Full Cut, 1999 –2015 is an ode to cinema and to the cinematic form, offering unprecedented insight into the stereotypes that populate our collective cultural imagination. Mining an extensive collection of iconic Hollywood films, telemovies and arthouse cinema, Montages: The Full Cut, 1999 –2015 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.

Tracey Moffatt is regarded internationally as one of the most important Australian artists of our time, and in 2017 will become the first Australian Indigenous artist to present a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Gary Hillberg has been a long-time collaborator of Moffatt’s and also has an independent practice as an experimental filmmaker and music video producer.


ABOUT THE ARTIST 
Tracey Moffatt uses a combination of film, video and photography to dismantle conventions of storytelling in a vividly Australian context, drawing on her own life experiences to explore issues of gender, race, sexuality and identity. Using a deliberately stylised artifice that references the history of art and photography, Moffatt’s body of work nevertheless transcends the specificities of Australian suburban living and the harshness of life in the outback to communicate meanings of universal significance – reflected in her established international reputation, which has garnered a global market for her work.

Moffatt (b. 1960) graduated from a visual communications degree at Queensland College of Art in 1982 and first gained attention with her films Night Cries (1990) and beDevil (1993), which were selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Comprehensive survey exhibitions of Moffatt’s work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2003–4), the Hasselblad Centre in Goteborg, Sweden (2004) and the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2011). In 2006, the artist had her first retrospective exhibition Tracey Moffatt: Between Dreams and Reality at Spazio Oberdan, Milan. A major monograph, ‘The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt’, was published by Charta Publishers, Milan in 2007.

Moffatt’s work is held in major collections across Australia including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, National Portrait Gallery and Queensland Art Gallery. Internationally, her work is held at institutions across the USA including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; at the Tate, London, as well as public and private collections across Europe and Asia. She was the recipient of the 2007 Infinity Award for Art by the International Centre of Photography, New York, and will represent Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Moffatt is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York.

Gary Hillberg received a Certificate of Proficiency, Film and Television Editing from AFTRS in 1981 and has been working as an experimental filmmaker and music video producer since the late 1980s. Hillberg has edited three commercial films: With Time to Kill (1984), Broken Highway (1993), and Hayride to Hell (1995) as well as collaborating with Tracey Moffatt on the montage series.

Hillberg presents regular movie reviews on RRR Melbourne’s weekly Film Buff’s Forecast. He currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.


Photo credit: Montages: The Full Cut, 1999 –2015 Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg, installation view Artspace, Sydney, 2016. Photo: Zan Wimberley (detail)