Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) is screening Montages: The Full Cut, 1999-2015, the full suite of eight montage films by artist Tracey Moffatt and her long-time collaborator Gary Hillberg until January 28.

BRAG has put together a pop-up cinema (including a large rug and bean bags) for people to come in, escape the heat and enjoy these films, the first time these films have been exhibited together. 

Montages: The Full Cut, 1999-2015 is an ode to cinema and to the cinematic form, offering unprecedented insight into the stereotypes that populate our collective cultural imagination. Mining an extensive collection of iconic Hollywood films, telemovies and arthouse cinema, Montages invents new fictions and plays with narrative and character conventions to create highly charged compositions on polemic themes such as love, art, revolution and destruction.

Tracey Moffatt is regarded internationally as one of the most important Australian artists of our time, and in 2017 was the first Australian Indigenous artist to present a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Gary Hillberg has been working as an experimental filmmaker and music video producer since the late 1980s.

To coincide with this exhibition, Museums & Galleries of NSW and BRAG developed a program called Montages: Express Yourself .

Artist Gary Hillberg and local film-maker Henry Denyer-Simmons were invited to work with students from Denison College Bathurst High Campus. The two-day workshop provided participants with an opportunity to investigate the exhibition from a youth perspective and investigate how new technologies and social media are changing the traditional form of montage.

Students then collaboratively collected different types of visual media, both found material and self-produced material or hybrids of the two, for example, filmed footage, screen recordings, photography/ Photoshop, audio, music, Tumblr, found footage from YouTube.

After learning new skills in Premier Pro, students re-contextualised their chosen imagery to create their own digital stories that culminated in a public screening event at the gallery last Thursday and will be on display until January 28.

BRAG also has a children’s drop-in activity room, where children can be inspired by the geometric works of Andrew Christofides to then design and make their own 3D shape or bunting flag to stick onto the gallery wall.