CATALOGUE ESSAY - MICHELLE TRAN
Published: Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne, August 2010.
Michelle Tran: Sky High
There is a sense of slippage to these moments. They exist between contexts. Time is loosened; ever so gently unhinged. Settings and subjects are set adrift; they levitate between states, chapters of a life.
But moments they are. Planned and composed; highly formalised, unadorned and economical. They are this way for a reason.
The photography of Michelle Tran represents an incursion into the fabric of personal history and identity. Flatly and evenly lit, clean and geometric – thoroughly staged – her works ripple with personal symbolism, signifiers and data. Formalism is a tool by which she loosens her subjects from their milieu, or “makes strange”.
It is a quality that extends throughout Sky High, Tran’s debut solo exhibition. Across a suite of at first seemingly disparate photographs, we witness floating points in a lineage. But these moments, these markers or signifiers, are by no means passive. There is a tension and reconciliation at work here: the self-definition of young adulthood and the relics, resonances and aspirations of an outer-suburban Vietnamese-Australian youth.
In one work, a high jumper is captured mid flight, a harsh flash illuminating her body as she twists over the horizontal bar. The gesture of a hand, the tense muscle contours of the back and shoulders, the final kick of the legs – she flies stark, bright and heroic into the flat, alien black of the night sky, free from the Earth’s surface if just for an instant. It is beyond metaphor. Tran was a competitive high jumper as a schoolgirl in Dandenong. Here, she photographs a shadow of herself.
It is a shift. Where much of her previous work consisted of restaged self-portraits, Sky High sees her import protagonists into the frame.
A young man holds a large white pigeon, as if an offering. Though he grows a beard, his appearance seems boyish: his skin washed out by the flat, unforgiving flash, the bird huge and imposing in his hand. The fact that the pigeon is one of Tran’s father’s pets adds another layer. The image is untethered, neither here nor there. A figure from Tran’s present grips a glyph from her past.
There are further markers and relics. There is the roguish cat, held at arm’s length in childish mischievousness; there is the young woman who could be mistaken for a girl. Elaborate, garish pearl-white curtains spill to the floor, only to be mirrored, wraithlike, on spotlessly polished floorboards, their presence extended in an echo of suburban domestic pride. A waterfall tumbles from the sky, its limits seemingly unreachable.
Much of the work’s poignancy comes down to Tran’s technique. Not unlike US photographer Roe Ethridge, it is her stylistic reductionism – her bare, geometric compositions and flat, impossibly even lighting – that allows her subjects to speak in such full voice. By loosening them from context she exposes their complexity.
But this exhibition, one feels, is still very much a personal body of work. As much as anything, Sky High seems an allegory for the ambiguousness of identity. While our lives can metamorphose, we are anchored however latently to our past.
Dan Rule
