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Tracey Moffatt
First Jobs series 2008
In 2008 Tracey Moffatt explored her experiences of paid employment during her teenage years and early twenties.
The titles of each of the twelve works identified the job and year she was employed.
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| Tracey Moffatt, First Jobs: 1977 Receptionist |
Gael Newton: a short essay written in 2008
Tracey Moffatt makes rather than ‘takes’ photographs. Her works orbit through and around themes of cultural and personal identity and the imagined lives we generate through visual fantasy. Her series prints often take their look from old picture magazine, movies, film stills and sets. Even when most ‘photographic’ in look, colours, texture and tone, are deployed to transform, disturb and re-clothe the original skeleton.
Brisbane-born and raised the internationally renowned artist and filmmaker (her most recent award was the 2007 Infinity Award for art from the International Center of Photography) works between her base in New York and homeland. Moffatt’s work dates from1984 but her oeuvre launched with Some Lads; her 1986 five part series of classic black and white portrait photographs of Aboriginal dancers in Sydney. Moffatt’s signature style of ambiguous, staged, colour enhanced, mixed-media works was established in1989 with her nine part black and white and colour photograph series Something more.
Moffatt’s titles have played on position and aspiration Something more, Up in the sky ; her rather under appreciated series Fourth of 2001 for example, took as its subject TV images of failed competitors in the Olympics. In her 2008 series First Jobs Moffatt (she has appeared in several series) inserts her own photograph into photographs sourced with great difficulty, to match or evoke the places she worked as a teenager and art student in Brisbane from 1975 -1984. A clear gel swiped on the image marks the spot where the artist’s image has been digitally inserted.
The images are prosaically titled in date order: Store Clerk 1975, Housekeeper 1975, Fruit market 1975, Hair washer 1976, Corner store 1977, Receptionist 1977, Meat Packing 1978, Pineapple Cannery 1978, Selling aluminium Siding 1978, Parking cars 1981, Waitress 1982, and lastly Canteen 1984. Each stop on the young artist-pilgrim’s way triggers memories for her audience about their own ‘first jobs’.
The latter are rights of passage rarely given their due in art as formative experiences. Moffatt appears busy happy and productive in her first jobs although she has spoken of how she resented rich kids who didn’t have to do them, but that she learned how to work with people and bosses.
The environment across each ‘First job’ locale is bright and light - almost fluorescent with harlequin colours appropriate to Queensland the sunshine state. The palette and effect recalls the mass market House & garden magazines, have a jolliness that was the message of the post-war Americanisation and consumerism. The images reflect products old and new from the corner store to the factory processed pineapple, the motel dining room to the corporate office. No shadows or spots of social problems, racism mar the images.
There is no hidden dramas behind these suburban facades as there was in Moffatt’s Scarred for Life series of 1994. Indeed in Waitress the most enigmatic image which shows the laid out dining tables in some motel-restaurant the artist is only glimpsed exiting the scene behind the vinyl concertina doors.
Click here for the twelve works
Click here for a review of the works on exhibition in 2009
Roslyn Oxley 9 Gallery (Sydney) First Jobs
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