Various: Future Tramp Super Tramp, Witch Doctor, River's Edge, Rainbow Cleopatra and Electric Brainstorm

For the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), TV Moore presented a new series of psychedelic photographs at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. While paint is referred to, it is not materially present in these works that translate paste and pigment via digital photographic processes. Moore digitally combines several different works into composite images that assault the senses with a veritable tempest of colour and information. Figures and forms emerge and recede through densely layered tones and textures that coalesce into a slick photographic surface, confounding the eye.

With titles such as Rainbow Cleopatra, Electric Brainstorm and Future Tramp Super Tramp (all 2013), these cross-pollinated, hybrid-media works seem caught in some kind of transformative episode – fit to bursting from their glossy Perspex lozenge. Bearing eyeballs trapped inside a frenzy of painting references and gestures, it is as if Moore is attempting to exorcise the artistic spirit from these collided, collaged exuberances.

Hyper-colourful and over-gesticulated, with paint swirls, smears and smudges, Moore’s works reference the overtly subjective, emotional excesses of American abstract expressionism. He pumps these references to the max, yet bastardises any purity of reference by bringing several signature markings together simultaneously – so we detect the colour-slashing gestures of Willem de Kooning, the thick impasto of Philip Guston, and perhaps even Peter Booth, Gerhard Richter and others lurking in the scatology of the things.

Moore is perhaps best known for his video and new media works, often using editing techniques, slow motion and mirroring to manipulate the viewer’s perception of time and create an atmosphere of pressure and anticipation. His practice engages performers and props and uses varied tropes from the worlds of cinema and experimental film to create works that lead the viewer to question their understanding of reality.

Moore’s two-channel video work The Dead Zone (2003) depicts a man running in slow motion, a terrified barefoot sprint through the deserted nightmare streets of Sydney’s central business district. The work is presented on opposing walls, the first projection showing the man fleeing from the camera, while in the other he moves towards it but the footage is played in reverse. Though there is no sign of another person, the man is clearly being pursued by something, pushed to the brink of exhaustion through fear and exertion. From the perspective of the viewer, standing between the two images in the area Moore refers to as ‘the dead zone’, the man seems to be perpetually running away from himself.

In recent years Moore has turned to digital manipulation and photographic techniques, creating two-dimensional works that re-imagine art history with a specific focus on modernism and painting. His psychedelic digital collages, such as Bret Easton Ellis (2012), are saturated with colour and alive with movement. Though they are technically photographic prints that have been pieced together from sections and slices of familiar paintings, Moore’s works move beyond the traditional mediums of painting and photography, crossing into a new realm constructed from history and imagination through the skilled use of technology.

Moore has a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney and a Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Arts. He has held recent solo shows at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney; KALIMANRAWLINS, Melbourne; Galerie Davide Gallo, Berlin; and Artspace, Sydney. Moore’s work has been seen in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, among them ‘Melbourne Now’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2013–14); ‘Future Primitive’, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne (2013); ‘Tell me Tell me: Australian and Korean Contemporary Art 1976–2011’, National Art School Gallery, Sydney (2011), and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon (2012); Busan Biennale (2008); 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008); and ‘High Tide: Currents in Contemporary Australian Art’, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw, and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2006). Moore was the winner of the Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts in 2009.