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TV MOORE
Working in a variety of media – primarily performance-for-video – internationally recognized artist and part-time provocateur TV Moore loosens the underpinnings of historically determined stock characters. Whether engaging magicians or explorers, vagrants or bohemians, Satanists or Prime Ministers, Moore divulges and redetermines the roles we expect these figures to play. By exploring the fantastic or the outlier on theatrical grounds, he calls into question the distillation of human nature into categorized neuroses. And by splicing anachronisms, he examines the very concept of the “stock” character, revealing and reframing the familiarly chronological narratives from which they come. Thus, Moore’s characters often feel like cyphers of shifting, nearly-knowable storylines, stand-ins for or transgressions from a new, distorted cultural geography.
Currently represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Moore graduated with an MFA from the Californian Institute for the Arts and has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand, CAC, Lithuania, Iaspis, Stockholm, Contemporary Art Space, Osaka, Japan and the first Torino Triennale at the Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Italy. TV Moore was commissioned to make a major new work for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney and was included in the 2008 Busan Biennale. Born in 1974 in Australia, Moore currently lives and works in Sydney and New York.
MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS
2009, Video, 7 min 13 sec
Following an installation of several of his performance-for-video works at MOMENTUM Sydney, Moore donated five editions of “Magick Without Tears” (2007) to the gallery’s founding collection. Concerned with exploiting reality by way of multiple camera angles and jarring, broken drumming, Moore here uses the clown’s ability to freely mock ruling systems as a statement for contemporary fictions. Just as a clown uses distortion to reveal truth, so to does today’s media create truth through narrative manipulation.
“In times past, clowns represented a freedom that was rarely granted in society. They could subvert authority and mock the rule of the day by blaspheming the very system in which they operated. By setting up a single scene and recording it through the gaze of several cameras, I am attempting to exploit reality and truth and expose these tropes as bizarre documented fact, just as the media represents images of truth that are obviously distorted.
The strange rhythm of the melancholic and almost broken drumming, in tandem with the cuts become trance like, which is a dark salute to the very seductive and manipulative inner structures of commercial moving image culture.
…Just keep watching…
The drummer plays his instrument with nonchalance, a comedy / tragedy – taking place in an unfamiliar make – shift universe. Two realities are being reinforced here while an unorthodox performance unfolds.”