Tracey Moffatt

Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s most renowned contemporary artists, both nationally and internationally. She is highly regarded for her formal and stylistic experimentation in film, photography and video and is known as a powerful visual storyteller. The narrative is often implied and self-referential, exploring her own childhood memories, and the broader issues of race, gender, sexuality and identity.

Since her first solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1989, Moffatt has held over 100 solo exhibitions of her work in Europe, the United States and Australia. Moffatt first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film, Night Cries – A Rural Tragedy, was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. Her first feature film, Bedevil, was also selected for Cannes in 1993. Moffatt was selected for the international section of the 1997 Venice Biennale (curated by Germano Celant) and has also featured in the Biennales of Sydney, Sao Paulo (1998) and Gwangju (1995). She held a major exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 1997-98 and in 2003, a large retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney which also travelled to the Hasselblad Museum in Sweden. In 2007, her photographic series, Scarred For Life, was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum and her video, LOVE, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. The same year, she was awarded the prestigious Infinity Award for art photography. In 2012, a retrospective programme of her films was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 2017, Tracey Moffatt represented Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition MY HORIZON in the Australian Pavilion, curated by Natalie King.

Artworks

Up In The Sky # 9, 1997, off set print, 61 x 76 cm, 72 x 102 paper size. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Up In The Sky # 17, 1997, off set print, 61 x 76 cm, 72 x 102 paper size,  Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

The 25 images in Up in the Sky series read like stills from a black-and-white movie, set in an Australian outback town desolated by poverty, violence and despair. The narrative of the series is non-linear, but threaded through it are the figures of a young white woman and a chubby Aboriginal baby who represent moments of peace and love amongst the menacing figures of grim nuns, withered old men and feral townspeople. Their presence speaks of the assimilationist policies and forced separations of Aboriginal families that haunt Australian history, and the experiences of so many country towns.

Reminiscent of the Australian apocalyptic road movie Mad Max (1979), the series also takes many of its stylistic and visual cues from another movie – Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone (1961), a gritty film about street life in the underbelly of Rome.

Of this work Moffatt has said: “My work is full of emotion and drama, you can get to that drama by using a narrative, and my narratives are usually very simple, but I twist it … there is a storyline, but … there isn’t a traditional beginning, middle and end.”

Video work OTHER (2010)

Tracey Moffatt’s fast paced montage videos compile scenes from film and television programs selected in response to a particular theme or coding. This is the final work in a suite of 7 videos made over the last decade. OTHER is one of the most mesmerising of the series as it edits together scenes of interracial encounters.

Moffatt utilises the clichés of cinematic representation of the ‘other’ to trace a pop culture history of how the west has represented its encounters with countries and peoples that are not itself. These mainstream representations somewhat hilariously reveal more about the cultures that made and consumed these films than the countries, peoples and histories they purport to depict. The ‘other’ here is a people and a place where the transgression of race, gender, and cultural norms can be imagined but which has little to do with any anthropological reality. As the clichés pile up this work is hugely entertaining, fast paced and sexy as it rolls through 60 years of moving image history. It also reiterates how desire, looking, power and the cinematic experience are so closely intertwined.