Tracey Moffatt
(1959 - ) |
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allegorical photographs, films, and videos Art Work
| Name: |
Tracey Moffatt |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Brisbane, Australia |
| Nationality: |
Australian |
| Birth: |
1959 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
allegorical photographs, films, and videos |
| Medium: |
Video, photography |
| Method: |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Photography
Filmaking
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Biography
Tracey Moffatt makes allegorical photographs, films and videos. They are symbolic and mythic, but also rooted in reality. Moffatt draws on cinematic conventions. She is influenced by Hollywood films, and her art has some similarities with the v. ' where Sherman presents intimate, staged images of individuals, Moffatt combines artifice (intense or faded colors, dramatic poses, dearly faked sets) with the eye of a documentary film-maker, and an engagement with wider society picturing groups as well as solo sitters.
Like Sherman, Moffatt has put herself in her pictures. In the group of nine photographs, Something More (1989), she appears as an impoverished Asian woman, a stereotype in a sexily torn cheong-sam, who dreams of escape from her rural home, but is murdered en route to a city (Brisbane). Made in the same year, the film Night-Cries (A rural tragedy) represents a fraught relationship between an old woman and her daughter, tied together in frustration and isolation- In Scarred for life (1994), photographs and text tell of traumas suffered by children and adolescents.
Moffatt's parents were Aboriginal, but she was adopted by a white couple. She has explored the complexities of Australia's colonial history and postcolonial 'urban Aboriginal culture' in her work. The film Nice colored girls (1987) juxtaposes images of young contemporary Aboriginal women out on the town, seducing and stealing from sailors, with the relationship between their ancestors and the colonial invaders. Up in the sky {1997), a series of twenty-five stills taken in the outback, is a disturbing dream-like evocation of a bleak, uncertain terrain. But Moffatt also has a sensual, humorous side. To make Heaven (1997), she gave video cameras to her female friends and asked them to film male surfers undressing. Interviewed in the catalogue for her exhibition at the Centre Cultural de la Fondacion 'la Caixa', Barcelona and the Centre National de la Photographie. Paris (1999-2000) Moffatt said that the piece was 'for all the women in the world who like to "look"'. |
Samples of Work
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