TRACEY MOFFATT - LAUDANUM #14, ED.21/60
TRACEY MOFFATT
LAUDANUM #14, ED.21/60, 1998
76 x 57 cm (paper); 99 x 70 cm (frame)
toned photogravure print on rag paper
PROVENANCE
Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney NSW
Private Collection, NSW
STORY
This image is from a series of 19 photogravures by Tracey Moffatt, called Laudanum. Laudanum was a popular opiate-based drug in the nineteenth century, used to calm colicky babies and ‘hysterical’ women. In this series, shot in a colonial mansion, Moffatt conjures a hallucinatory narrative of sexual violence between a white mistress and her Asian maid, filtered through what seems to be a drug-fuelled haze.Moffatt started out as a filmmaker, and this series draws on a range of cinematic, visual and literary devices to create the claustrophobic atmosphere of the mansion and the murderous game that unfolds within its walls. She employs the technique of photogravure, a form of photographic etching using a copper plate, to re-create the authentic look of a nineteenth century photograph with its full range of soft grey tones and uneven focus. To further the historical effect, Moffatt frames the images in formats favoured by early photographers, and poses her subjects like the models of illicit French postcards from the turn of the century. Moffatt cleverly blends these photographic styles with cinematic devices drawn from twentieth-century expressionist films like Nosferatu (1922) and tense psychological dramas like The Servant (1963). The disturbing story which unfolds over the course of the 19 images is a narrative of sexual subservience and domination akin to the musings of the Marquis de Sade or the erotic novel The Story of O (1954).Moffatt concocts a fantasy of the hidden and unrecorded lives of nineteenth-century women; the servants and mistresses bound by corsets and convention, but unbound by drugs and desire. By adopting the style of early photography and setting this drama within the confines of a Victorian mansion, Moffatt suggests a depravity underlying the bourgeois respectability and gentility synonymous with those times. In drawing on so many references she creates a rich evocation of the historical depiction of sexual, racial and social tensions in art and film.- MCA
EXHIBITED
Tracey Moffatt, Laudanum, 14 April – 8 May 1999, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, NSW
ARTIST PROFILE
