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Lot Essay
The series 'Up in the Sky'was commissioned by the prestigious Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997. Upon completion of the series, an edition of 'Up in the Sky', together with a video by Moffatt titled 'Heaven', was exhibited at the Center under the exhibition title Free-Falling.
'Up in the Sky' is Moffatt's largest photographic series, comprising twenty-five images in total. At the time of its creation it represented a change in direction for the artist, whose work up to that point had been characterised by a theatrically staged, colour-saturated style. Moffatt has created works in the mediums of both short film and photography and to date, 'Up in the Sky' remains her most ambitious merging of the two mediums.
In both style and subject matter the works refer to film, in particular Accatone, an Italian film made in 1961 by the director Pier Pasolini and Mad Max, an Australian cult classic directed by George Miller. While 'Up in the Sky' contains numerous references to a specific tradition of European cinema, (with the title taken from a song sung by a character in the Pasolini film), Moffatt's cultural invocations extend to Australia and America.
This series also represented a departure in that it was the first series that Moffatt shot on location. She chose for her setting a post-apocalyptic landscape of highways, deserts and shanty-towns. The landscape is deliberately geographically non-specific; the location could be the Australian outback of the American mid-West with a cast of trailer-park inhabitants. As Tunnicliffe perceptively noted: "(the location is)... anywhere that has a rural hinterland and a dispossessed marginalised community."(W.Tunnicliffe, "Tracey Moffatt", Strange Days The 4th Guinness Contemporary Art Project, Sydney, 1998, p. 24.)
While the setting is real, the action retains a sense of artificiality, negating the documentary style adopted in several of the images. offatt also manipulates our expectations of narrative, using techniques of disjunction and repetition to frustrate our schooled desire to read a temporal and linear progression into the works. While in some images narrative is suggested, in others it remains tantalisingly oblique. Like Moffatt's 1989 series 'Something More', in which a female protaganist undertook an ultimately doomed journey in search of identity and transcendence, there is the temptation that to interpret 'Up in the Air' as the unfolding of a messianic prophecy, a temptation that is subverted by Moffatt's re-casting of the paradigmatic Western myth of the hero in both feminist and post-colonial terms. The heroic white male is now an Aboriginal, forced to share the dramatic stage and allocation of power with women. In 'Up in the Air', Moffatt interweaves allusions to narratives bred by cultural discourse with an absence of didacticism, resulting in powerful and haunting images that reward the viewer with the opportunity to constantly re-create meaning.
'Up in the Sky' is Moffatt's largest photographic series, comprising twenty-five images in total. At the time of its creation it represented a change in direction for the artist, whose work up to that point had been characterised by a theatrically staged, colour-saturated style. Moffatt has created works in the mediums of both short film and photography and to date, 'Up in the Sky' remains her most ambitious merging of the two mediums.
In both style and subject matter the works refer to film, in particular Accatone, an Italian film made in 1961 by the director Pier Pasolini and Mad Max, an Australian cult classic directed by George Miller. While 'Up in the Sky' contains numerous references to a specific tradition of European cinema, (with the title taken from a song sung by a character in the Pasolini film), Moffatt's cultural invocations extend to Australia and America.
This series also represented a departure in that it was the first series that Moffatt shot on location. She chose for her setting a post-apocalyptic landscape of highways, deserts and shanty-towns. The landscape is deliberately geographically non-specific; the location could be the Australian outback of the American mid-West with a cast of trailer-park inhabitants. As Tunnicliffe perceptively noted: "(the location is)... anywhere that has a rural hinterland and a dispossessed marginalised community."(W.Tunnicliffe, "Tracey Moffatt", Strange Days The 4th Guinness Contemporary Art Project, Sydney, 1998, p. 24.)
While the setting is real, the action retains a sense of artificiality, negating the documentary style adopted in several of the images. offatt also manipulates our expectations of narrative, using techniques of disjunction and repetition to frustrate our schooled desire to read a temporal and linear progression into the works. While in some images narrative is suggested, in others it remains tantalisingly oblique. Like Moffatt's 1989 series 'Something More', in which a female protaganist undertook an ultimately doomed journey in search of identity and transcendence, there is the temptation that to interpret 'Up in the Air' as the unfolding of a messianic prophecy, a temptation that is subverted by Moffatt's re-casting of the paradigmatic Western myth of the hero in both feminist and post-colonial terms. The heroic white male is now an Aboriginal, forced to share the dramatic stage and allocation of power with women. In 'Up in the Air', Moffatt interweaves allusions to narratives bred by cultural discourse with an absence of didacticism, resulting in powerful and haunting images that reward the viewer with the opportunity to constantly re-create meaning.