Held during the UWA Perth International Arts Festival, this major exhibition of work surveys the past 15 years of one of Australia’s most internationally celebrated contemporary artists.
Tracey Moffatt was born in 1960 in Brisbane. In 1982 she graduated in Visual Communications from the Queensland College of Art. She then moved to Sydney in 1983 where she became active as an independent filmmaker and photographer. Her first solo exhibition was in Sydney in 1989 and she has since exhibited in numerous national and international art exhibitions and film festivals. Moffatt’s short film, Night Cries, was selected for official competition in the 1990 Cannes Film Festival and her first feature film, Bedevil, was selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 1993. Her photographs are included in many Australian public and private collections, as well as in the United States, and her work has featured in both solo and group exhibitions all over the world, including Switzerland, New Zealand, UK, Germany, Italy, and USA.
This exhibition takes over the entire John Curtin Gallery and includes both photographic works, such as Something More (1989) and Scarred for Life (1994), and video works, such as Night Cries – A Rural Tragedy (1990) and BeDevil (1993). The photographs and films of Moffatt are bright, deliberately composed and confrontational. Violence, implicit, artificial or apparently real, cuts through all of her work, disturbing the surface and leaving the viewer unsettled. Throughout her work the narrative is ghostlike, present but difficult to fully resolve, haunting and puzzling. Having trained as a filmmaker, Moffatt uses all the devices of and artifice available to a director – casting, script writing, stage, studio, lighting, sound, art direction and editing – to create visions that hover between the public spaces of popular culture and its myths, and the ghosts of personal memory and misremembered dreams.
The intensity of subject matter contained within Moffatt’s early work is drawn from her experience growing up in suburban Brisbane as an Aboriginal child and teenager in an extended white foster family. Her more recent work explores the impact of film and images of popular culture in shaping our lives. She has drawn from popular culture in Australia, Britain and the United States, for instance, television programs, images of sport and life on the street.
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