iChau Chak Wing MuseumCamperdown
Tracey Moffatt: Sorted – a look at her Archive
The first archive of its kind donated to an Australian museum, tracing photographer and filmmaker Tracey Moffatt's career since 1985 through photo series, films and ephemera.
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One wall holds three photographs Tracey Moffatt titled Art That Does Not Work. She shot one series in a pioneer village while moving the camera and got "nothing but blur"; another set turned "awful" when she tried wax on them. Opposite hangs Scarred for Life II, her childhood humiliations: the only boy on the rugby team in a hand-knitted jersey, a kid made to cut the lawn with scissors.
The show marks an anonymous gift of an edition of every photograph, film and video Moffatt has made since 1985, the first archive of its kind given to an Australian museum. Beside the film montage Other (2010) are her Warhol-inspired "time capsules" of idea sketches, test prints, film props and letters. You come for a famous artist and get her rejects hung as carefully as her hits.
The museum calls this "a tiny percentage" of the archive, and Moffatt asked for no "big Tracey Moffatt show". It's free with no booking, in the Power Gallery on Level 1.
Look for
Art That Does Not Work
Look for the triptych of failed test prints: a pioneer village blurred by a moving camera, and pictures Moffatt ruined trying to wax them.
Scarred for Life II
Hung opposite the rejects, staged scenes of childhood ignominy, like the only boy on the rugby team in a hand-knitted jersey or a kid cutting the lawn with scissors.
Departure/Arrival
From the Portals series, two photos side by side: a hotel exterior, and a woman holding a suitcase on a long straight road, empty but for one car.
Good for
- Cheap Culture
- Locals Who've Seen It All
- Nerding Out
Skip if
You want a full Moffatt retrospective: this is a small slice of her archive, at her own request.
Also at Chau Chak Wing Museum
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Image credits
7
- Tracey Moffatt: Sorted – a look at her ArchiveCourtesy of Chau Chak Wing Museum
- David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)Photo by Justin Sutcliffe © David Hockney
- Andy Ewing: Ancestor Spirits / Kirthana Selvaraj: In the Half Light© The Estate of Andrew Ewing
- Chau Chak Wing MuseumNick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0
- White Rabbit GallerySmart Design Studio / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
- CarriageworksNick-D, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
- 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian ArtChris Olszewski (Kgbo), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0