BIOGRAPHY

Kris Moyes is more than a director. He's an artist who molds the underground’s zeitgeist into a neat mathematical aesthetic which sells records and lifestyles. His style is instantly recognizable: there are the intensely colorful animations; there is the preoccupation with geometry; there are the stripped-back, raw puppets; there are the hand-drawn flying penises; there are the men in leather with their effeminate hand-claps...

Born in 1978, Moyes spent his youth drawing Lebanese pregnant men-women with hairy backs and having nightmares about satellites. He studied Time Based Art at Sydney's College of Fine Arts where he earned a colossal reputation for his provocative and transgressive video art. Finding the gallery environment constrictive, Moyes eventually found solace with the democratic medium of music video.

Since 2005, Kris Moyes has been making videos for bands such as Wolfmother, Franz Ferdinand, Cut Copy, Hercules and Love Affair, Architecture in Helsinki and Beck. His 2006 video for The Presets’ single Are You the One? received the Australian Dance Music award for Best Music Video and his clip for the same band’s hit, My People, earned him an ARIA award for Best Music Video in 2008. In the same year, he brought together infamous surf gang The Bra Boys to sing the Lebanese national anthem in a video for Pangea Day, an international multimedia event. And Moyes’ recent forays into the world of television commercials for companies as diverse as Cadbury/Schweppes and Lacoste have reinvigorated that little interruption during your favorite tv show.

On the surface, it may seem like he’s some kinda hipster trend-setter, but there’s much more to Kris Moyes’ work. Patterns are formed and then ruptured. Themes are spun out until they leave their original form, and then mysteriously appear again. A non-Euclidean geometry, obedient to its own laws, can always be felt in his videos, but it’s seldom easy to articulate. In his hands, the tired old approach of “retro” irony and nostalgia becomes an exciting new language; like some kind of 21st century Proust, Moyes can take the smallest visual detail, seemingly commonplace, and use it to trigger rich gushes of forgotten memories and associations.

When his guard is down, Moyes speaks of plans for feature films set in the not-too-distant future and Richard Pryor (though not necessarily at the same time). Significantly, he is a tall son-of-a-bitch.