Auckland-based artist Tahi Moore creates whimsical and poetic work that considers the peculiarity of the every-day. Often incorporating a variety of media including painting, readymade objects, and video that reference high fashion, advertising, and Hollywood movies. There is typically no conventional logic to Moore’s installations, rather the mix of disparate elements allow gallery visitors to create their own poetic meanings.
For the Te Tuhi Project Space, Moore creates a new experimental body of work. Choosing to exhibit in a rough unkempt gallery space featuring remnants of the last exhibition, Moore presents six video works of various sizes and orientations throughout the room. The works feature mostly travel footage from the artist’s recent visit to Germany and Paris. Largely shot from the perspective of train and plane windows, aimless street wandering, and quizzical investigations of budget accommodation. Here Moore also presents fleeting questions that feature as subtitles in two of the works that secretly pose metaphysical musings. The transitory point of view that the works provide of the world suggest a leisurely gaze that might invoke introspective thought while travelling - to contemplate poetically on life or simply to watch in mindless wonder. However, random additions to the footage and sculptural elements in the space disrupt any flaneur-like romanticism.
As if to throw an existential spanner into the works Moore also includes purposefully disruptive edits, un-synced soundscapes and barely audible conversations. Sculpturally, a nonsensical speaker system fuels discontinuity while a wooden pyramid that sits in the middle of the gallery floor channels some sort of light hearted mysticism. In this sense Moore’s installation, lengthily titled I guess you’d call it a video composition with pyramid and beats, melds, sincere, ironic and matter-of-fact elements not to provide a singular grand meaning but to engage in idiosyncratic forms of spatiotemporal logic.
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