Tracey Moffatt - First Job Series..

What is her practice? How are her works made?

Tracey Moffatt is an Indigenous Australian artist that is not necessarily under the genre of indigenous art.  Moffatt mainly uses mediums such as photography and video to create her art. However the artworks she produced are not the usual sort of video art or photography you’d expect. Moffatt makes her artwork absurd and strange to look at by changing and adding effects such as; strange colours, high to low contrast, bright lighting, less or more detail and a blurred sharpness. An example of this can be seen in the artwork ‘Fruit Market, 1975 (below)’ which shows all of the previous effects listed.

What is the theme present in these artworks?

In Moffatt’s Fruit market series all of the photos appear to have the same sort of effects added. They all have the now-dated seventies colours scheme present. For example in the ‘Fruit Market, 1975’ photo pictured above you can see the front of the counter has a creamy pink paint job combined with a reflective surface present on the far left of the counter. This colour can too be seen in the sign on the back wall. The colour scheme present is typical of the seventies and Moffatt has successfully recreated a fruit store from the seventies, even though it was taken in 2008. The theme moffatt is trying to create is a sense of age and time, the fact that these stores that she worked in as an adolescent are still in existence. This typical seventies pink colour accompanied with other typical seventies colours can be seen in the ‘Hair Washer, 1976’ (below) with the cream green on the hair dryers and the bold yellow on the chairs.