Tracey Moffatt and Michael Parekowhai

Overview

You’ll laugh and you’ll cry at Tracey Moffatt’s filmic collage, Mother. It is a predictable, somewhat maudlin homage to the mother figure, and makes for a very satisfying 20 minutes of celluloid absorption.

Emerging from the dark focus room at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (with inward vows to call your own mother) you excuse yourself to one of Michael Parekowhai’s The Brothers Grimm figures for almost bumping into him. He doesn’t seem to mind; he’s unassuming and impenetrable, like all his brothers who fill the main gallery space. The three antelope figures, a buck and two doe, make an elegant and complete addition but they also seem to care little for our intrusion into their space, looking downward and beyond us.

The overall feeling of Parekowhai’s Seldom is Herd is one of slick surfaces and misleading guises, with an inkling that if you spend a bit of time with them, they may just follow you home.

Image: Michael Parekowhai, The Brothers Grimm, 2009, automotive paint on fibreglass, 163 x 52 x 49 cm each, courtesy the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.