Stylistically, Robyn Stacey's work represents a cohesive evolution of ideas and themes that can be traced through her last three series.
From the tableaux of WELL KNOWN UNKNOWNS (1985) and photography as contrivance, as explored in KISS KISS BANG BANG (1987), to the 1988-89 film montage REDLINE 7000 series, the style derives from the traditions of studio portraiture, the themes are pulp/noir and the philosophy - existential trash.
Her images are hand-coloured, multi-layered, rephotographed cibachromes – paint and image unified beneath the seductive, flawless skin of superplasticity. Within these self-referencing environments, the carefully devised images have a poetic presence which invites suspension of disbelief.
Her work has increasingly combined the photographic and the graphic, demonstrating a discernible filmic shift. The title REDLINE 7000 comes from an obscure 1965 Howard Hawks film. Its choice signifies Stacey's interest in the seamless look of homogenised Hollywood, best typified by the emphatic style of the movie billboard.
The scale of the work is fundamental to the poster/billboard reference. Movie posters offer detailed pictorial synopses, using montage to encompass otherwise impossible keypoint juxtapositions.
Like the movie poster, Stacey's work is a distillation of imaginary drama. Staccato images are superimposed like narrative layers, to provide a sub-text of suggestions, highlights and key moments. While a narrative interpretation is invited and directed, the work remains open to individual reading.
The scenarios implied in REDLINE 7000 use noir films as a starting thread. The common theme is the City – the sad and dangerous, hyper-real city of the imagination, whose dark streets, neon signs and bars are quintessential pulp/noir territory.
To explore these imagined precincts Stacey creates an expressionist extension of the violence and obsessions of the milieu. The city is at once the backdrop and the focal point of the action. The images make implicit commentary on the nature and power of the city, never manifest as a neutral force.
A sense of entrapment pervades, The images are an amalgam of stereotypes, classic icons and symbols from noir/gangster movies like the woman and the gun. Neon signs bleed over dark alleyways and seedy diners onto violently backlit, fugitive figures.
This imagery is pared down to potent graphic symbols, representing notions of pursuit, danger and urban uncertainty. At the same time, the characters and motives of these running figures are deliberately ambiguous.
The women in REDLINE 7000 are extensions of the noir stereotype of the Spider Woman. With her contradictory, unstable characterisations, she is forever enmeshed in patterns of violence and submission. Through the implicitly investigative narrative structure of the work, Stacey probes the sexualised depiction of women.
Carefully manipulating, editing and focusing upon each masquerade, Stacey's photographic evacuation of any real sexual passion or presence becomes a positive strategy of evasion. The shamelessly provocative, overcompliant women she presents are both enigmatic and artificial.
The finely judged irony in her deployment of formal aesthetics effectively translates subjects into hyper-real objects suspended between the familiar and the unknown.
Expressions are limpid, faces as pool-like as the cibachrome finish, lending an aura of cosmetic-ad perfection. Stacey, in dealing with the notion of the hyper-real, is breaking down and reconstructing the desire/lack equation.
The shiny, impenetrable surface of the cibachromes parody reality - the images are artefacts which mimic the photographic notion of perfection. The cinematic techniques, methods and themes Stacey uses suggest a new poetics for image making.