Jeff Moorfoot conTEXT presents a satirical dialogue between image and text, bringing together several discrete bodies of work in a broad pastiche of pictures + words.
“any art that doesn’t offend someone, somewhere at sometime, ain’t art – it’s decor!”
LOONEY BIN
The subjects who appear in theses photographs are in the main, photographers. They are all members of an anarchic photographic group called ‘free radicals’, now in abeyance, but at it’s height boasted a membership of more than 850 members across Australia and the rest of the world.
These images result from a self assigned project at a photographic retreat undertaken by the free radicals in 2005 at the former mental asylum, long since decommissioned.
DON’T MAKE ME LAUGH
I started photographing clowns when I was invited to judge to photography section at the Daylesford Agricultural and Pastoral show in 2007.
These clowns, although nothing more than fibreglass and paint, appear to have their own individual personalities, and if they could talk, I imagine this is what they might be saying!
CONDOMONIUM
an amalgam of condom and pandemonium, is a tongue in cheek look at the synergy when the condom – an unambiguous intervention between a life that could have been [or from an alternate point of view – the prevention of a life threatening illness] and the xmas cracker trinket join forces. The combination of the two elements act as a trigger for stream of consciousness text which enfolds the visual image and takes the viewer on a journey as whacky and remote as the combination of such dissociated objects.
I AM CURIOUS: YELLOW
Yellow is often considered the brightest and most energising of the warm colours. This series borrows its title from the 1967 erotic Swedish movie of the same name [minus the colon]. Unlike the direct social and feminist stance taken with works in a similar vein by Barbara Kruger I am curious : yellow offers a broader commentary, from biting parody to complete and utter nonsense in an attempt to be all things to all men.
THE MOSQUE CLOCK
The mosque clock follows on from the inaugural AIPP Australia Day Trophy, a fun event in which members were charged with documenting our national day [January 26] in 2002. I won the trophy with a series called ‘A Day at the Beach’ in which I made 24 self portraits undertaking beach activities, which I stitched together using my none too developed computer skills and output as a very long skinny type C print.
This time, I made a linear documentation of my day in which one of my favourite possessions, the mosque clock, would appear as a time stamp. I had to cheat the first two images , but from then on, the time shown on the clock was legit, as was the final image which the went off and made a perfect end point to the series.
CREDITS
Artist
Jeff Moorfoot, OAM
Exhibition
conTEXT, Maud Gallery, 2022
Medium
Archival pigment inkjet prints, limited editions, available.
Selected Viewing Room
Condomonium
Enquiries
Pricing and availability on request via Maud Gallery. Please quote the. artwork title.
CURATORIAL NOTE
conTEXT by Jeff Moorfoot operates as a deliberately unstable field where image and language collide. Across four distinct series—Looney Bin, Don’t Make Me Laugh, Condomonium and I Am Curious: Yellow—Moorfoot constructs a loose, satirical framework that resists coherence in favour of friction, contradiction and absurdity.
Rather than illustrating meaning, text in these works destabilises it. Words interrupt, redirect and occasionally undermine the image, creating a dialogue that is as much about misreading as it is about interpretation. The result is a body of work that oscillates between parody and critique, never settling into a single position.
In Looney Bin, photographs made within the grounds of a decommissioned psychiatric institution capture members of the anarchic photographic collective ‘free radicals’, turning the lens back onto the culture of image-making itself. Don’t Make Me Laugh shifts to the uncanny presence of painted clown figures—static, artificial, yet imbued with imagined voice and personality. Condomonium pushes further into absurdity, pairing incongruous objects with streams of associative text that unravel any fixed reading. In I Am Curious Yellow, Moorfoot draws on the cultural charge of colour and title to construct a space that moves freely between parody, provocation and nonsense.
What binds these series is not subject matter but method: a sustained interest in the instability of meaning. Moorfoot treats photography not as documentation but as a site of construction—where humour, language and visual form intersect to produce something deliberately unresolved.
