Tracey Moffatt
Tracey Moffatt | Australia b. 1960 | Diptych no. 2 (from 'Plantation' series) 2009 | Digital print with archival pigments, InkAid, watercolour paint and archival glue on handmade Chautara Lokta paper | 45.5 x 50cm (each) | Courtesy: The artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney
b.1960 Brisbane, Australia
Lives and works in New York, United States, and Sunshine Coast, Australia
One of Australia’s most prominent contemporary artists, Tracey Moffatt works in photography, video and film. She graduated from the Queensland College of Art’s Film and Video course in 1982 and, since her first solo exhibition in 1989, has maintained a high profile as one of the key Australian artists working across issues of identity and gender, especially in relation to Aboriginal Australia. Witty, sensual and subversive, her major photographic suites consist of complex images of characters and locales that allow her to consider desire, provinciality, race, and the longing for escape from social constraint. Moffatt employs every kind of artifice — using models, actors, make up, costume, and painted and digitised backgrounds — to create a heightened sense of tension and mystery; yet characteristically her works do not permit a simple resolution to their intriguing narratives. Moffatt's visual repertoire is rich, sourced principally from popular cultural forms such as film, photography, television and mass-produced publications. With considerable panache, she mines these sources to prod collective memories, creating ‘stories’ that appear to be already known. Moffatt’s often light-hearted tone does not, however, blind observers to the seriousness of purpose that is the key to her playful, intelligent and immensely enjoyable work. For APT6, Tracey Moffatt is showing two new works. Plantation, a suite of 12 photographic diptychs printed in colour on handmade paper, depicts mysterious events set in gorgeous tropical locales, with evident tensions that could resonate across many cultures. Other, a funny, dramatic and sexy six-minute montage compilation DVD, riffs on the ways ‘the native’ has been portrayed in cinema.
Exhibitions: (solo): Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Australia, 2008; Location One, New York, United States, 2008; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada, 2005; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia, 2003–04. Exhibitions: (group): Biennale of Sydney, Australia, 2008; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, United States, 2008; Liverpool Biennial, United Kingdom, 2008; Sharjah Biennial, United Arab Emirates, 2005.
