Tahi Moore (SQUARE2)
Channel surfing
Tahi Moore's video Late Night T.V. (2006) samples footage from a wide array of sources. Scenes from films, television programmes and New Zealand photography are spliced together, some shown in rewind and others seemingly in slow motion. We view a scene from what looks like Hitchcock's North by Northwest, another of a couple dancing, their actions oddly reversed, and then we bizarrely jump to one of Anne Noble's Antarctica photographs.
Such scenes are interspersed with views of interiors and beaches featuring a mysterious colour wheel whirling its way across the screen threatening to dissolve the image. These moments are important junctures, causing the familiar or recognizable to break down into abstract patterns, causing a visual effect not unlike the effect of taking a photograph into the sun, or the sensation you get when you squint your eyes tightly closed and then open them to find the world overlaid with multicoloured spots.
Watching Tahi Moore's Late Night T.V., it's almost as if we are picking up another frequency, where the aura of all things is suddenly discernible, as we channel surf late at night.
Sarah Farrar
Tahi Moore artist bio:
Born 1972, Auckland
Lives and works in Auckland
Bachelor of Fine Arts, University of Auckland
Selected solo exhibitions include: 'German Sands / Our Faces', Gambia Castle, Auckland (2007); 'News is also on the television' (with Simon Denny), Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland (2006); 'A movie that's good, but not that good', Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Auckland Art Gallery (2006); 'Darlington Williamson', Special Gallery, Auckland (2005).
Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Moment Making’, Artspace, Auckland (2007); ‘One God, No masters’, Hamish McKay Gallery, Wellington (2006); ’What I did before I stopped being an artist’ Special Gallery, Auckland (2005); ‘Tahi at Canary’, Canary Gallery, Auckland (2005); ‘Left Di Right’, with Simon Denny, Special Gallery, Auckland (2004); ‘Die Duie Die’, with Simon Denny, George Fraser Gallery, Auckland (2003).
Image credits:
Tahi Moore
Stills from Late Night T.V. 2006
DVD
Courtesy of the artist