DIVING INTO
Tracey Moffat montages, touch me not, disinfectant and revulsion, #isoart, intimacy denied, authority gained, divine reappearances, .
CURATOR’S NOTES
Now we speak often of sickness and death, caution and crackdown, ordinance. Ordinary peacetime values are up for grabs. And yet it’s possible that the greatest aftershocks of coronavirus won’t be its health effects, but a culture war over liberty, lives and government.
Artists are always obsessive, always making rules and frameworks for themselves. In confinement, Sarah Hadley began searching her hard-drives for images of order, curiosity, recoil, disgust, chaos and outright apocalypse. She tapped genres where touch and distance are exploited as fleshy fetishes: science fiction, catastrophic action dramas, war movies, natural disaster films, all of which take fear of the other – aliens, deformities, foreign powers, the supernatural – as their dramatic engines.
In these newly forged image sequences, we see how commercial cinema dictates and pronounces images of seduction, marginalisation and control. We see others who miss their lives, miss others and miss breathing together.
About Sarah Hadley
With degrees in both cinema studies (UNSW) and theatre directing (NIDA), Sarah Hadley is a stage and screen director who makes experimental theatre and moving image works.