Disoriented Imagery
By Jonathan Turner
Sull’ Arte.it (September 25, 2008)
Distortion, reflection and emotional manipulation are three recurring themes in the photo-based works of Tracey Moffatt, Marina Paris and Beatrice Pediconi. While they each have distinctly different styles and histories, all three artists use photography as a tool or raw material with which to further their research and expression. Sometimes playful, sometimes subversive, all three artists are well-versed in the language of visual disorientation. As well as pure photography, their works include elements of installation, film and manual intervention in the form of drawing or painting. Like magicians’ assistants, Moffatt, Paris and Pediconi are adept at covert illusion.
The gallery presents for the first time in Italy the trilogy made up of the two last videos Revolution (2008) and Doomed (2007), and also the video Love (2003), all realized in cooperation with Gary Hillberg.
Moffatt uses existing footage from melodramatic films, spliced and re-edited to create new stories which function as her reinterpretations of wayward social behaviour. Often these involve the stereotypes of portrayals of love and violence. The artist reveals her ongoing fascination with celebrity, the exploration of the alter-ego and the creation of fictional realities in her photographic series Under the Sign of Scorpio (2005). Here Moffatt impersonates other famous women born under the zodiac sign of Scorpio. From American fashion editor Anna Wintour to Romanian Olympic gymnast Nadia Comanici, Moffatt parades herself as a female chameleon in minimal disguise. In these works, Moffatt’s photographs are printed as proof sheets, or as dramatic portraits in front of psychedelic cloud-bursts.
As revealed in her recent installation at the 15th Quadriennale in Rome, Marina Paris purposely alters our concept of space by tricking our senses. Some installations create a feeling of tunnel vision in the viewer, others incorporate silhouettes of wide urban landscapes in finely drawn line-work. Using warped mirror surfaces, Paris photographs an Italian courtyard, then shifts the image to confuse our eye. In the reflections, the sky becomes a bottomless pit. We don’t know whether we are looking at reality, inverted architecture or at the artist’s futuristic vision. Paris recreates reality on her own terms, in a series aptly named Variable Space.
Printed on opalescent paper, Pediconi’s imagery is an unusual synthesis of painting and photography. In bright sunshine, the artist drops ink into a tub of water, makes expressive black swirls on the surface and then photographs the results from above. In her series Corpi Sottili (Subtle Bodies) 2007, as the ink dilutes and flows, it creates faint shadows and areas of dissipating darkness. There are flashes of light and shimmering reflections. We are forced to decipher the technique as well as the gesture. Both are equally fluid. As such, Pediconi photographs can be seen as authentic documents of fleeting abstract forms.