APOCATOPIA (VOL 1)

… I hear that freight train comin' and I just wanna get on it….. (1)

The Apocalypse could be said to have happened slowly, in increments and right under our noses.  The violence of events when reported become dumb, spectral images. Events become digital, signifiers of the carnage. Mute. Representations show up the gap between images and our distance from the information we receive. Signs worm their way between hopes that a perfect society is still possible. What can fill the cracks if 'Utopia' as an idea is annihilated? And yet the cataclysm of Biblical proportions is still offered as a way out up ahead. Moore asks, "Is the Promised Land any better or has it already been corrupted by morons?" (2).

In TV Moore's Apocatopia a Huckleberry-Finn-punk-preacher performs old Southern Baptist gospels (3). Baying out raw words. Finger-picking and thrumming over—You can't make out every line. Hard to tell… yet shards of the message models a meaning, makes out a kernel of a concept that one can build from. Bluegrass repeats and folds over, the words are repeated and the meaning is changed. Once you've heard something once, the second time bears comparison.

It is a physical performance in seven scenes. A decision to use single video stills as backdrops to the performance heightens their symbolic associations."Tornado." "Car bomb." Moore employs the White-Stripes-esque circle cuts and green-screened no-spaces, coloured blue and lemon as an iPOD = iLlFE
anti-aesthetic. The colour of the moving images are toned-down towards grey-scale against the surfeit of eye-catching campaigns. The boy plays a fiddle in a mall that has a sale on American flags. It is Walmart, one of the biggest multinational companies in the world. The new church. And then the preacher takes to the city streets with a banjo and an armory of songs, as the hour gets late and the sun goes down.

Violence. Mass trauma. It takes effort to avert your eyes on the street. Buy stuff and don’t feel guilty.

The work is presented as a bretheren of five TV monitors, each playing the same film and same soundtrack. You have a choice, but of the same. The monitors are not brand new or super slick. From a few years back and getting close to obsolescence.

The boy is a vehicle, a pied piper for culture, history, religion and current happenings. His true voice and his trying. You wait to see if he falters in his sincerity. It's strange that the word Apocalypse can be used interchangeably with The Book of Revelations. The songs were made just for these states, much worse than the blues.

Volume One gets you asking about deliverance.

—Naomi Evans

(1)    TV Moore, email 2 November 2006
(2)    TV Moore, ibid.
(3)    Uncle Charlie Osborne, Uncle Dave Macon, Almedo Riddle, Skip James, Amade Adoin, Cass Wallin, Peter Seeger

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TV Moore graduated from Sydney College of the Arts in 1999. He recently completed his Master of Fine Art at CalArts, Los Angeles. In 2000 he exhibited his video installation, Urban Army Man, at Artspace Sydney and was selected for Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2001. TV Moore’s epic ten-channel video installation, The Neddy Project, was first exhibited at Artspace, Sydney (2004). This work was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and exhibited in full as part of MCA Collection: New Acquisitions in Context (2005). Moore’s work was selected for High Tide: Currents in Contemporary Australian Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, Poland and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania (2006), the inaugural Torino Triennale, T1: The Pantagruel Syndrome, Turin Triennale (2005) and City-dwelling Demons, Osaka Art Kaleidoscope at Contemporary Art Space Osaka, Japan (2005). Other group exhibitions include, Slow Rushes – Takes on the documentary sensibility in moving images from around Asia and the Pacific, at the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania (2004), Gridlock: cities, structures, spaces, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2004) and I thought I knew but I was wrong, Ssamzie Space, Seoul, South Korea  and the ACMI, Melbourne, an Asialink/ACMI touring exhibition (2005). Moore is a recent recipient of the prestigious Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, and the 2005 Montalvo Fellowship, USA. Apocatopia (Vol. 1) is Moore’s third solo show at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.